A movie shot in first person sounds like a gimmick. Part of the magic of filmed storytelling is accepting that something can be from someone’s point of view and yet also from a distance. Using the camera as a character’s actual eyes is the domain of university students and niche experimental filmmakers. In a commercial film, it’s to be deployed only in very limited doses.

And yet, with “Nickel Boys,” filmmaker RaMell Ross not only commits to the idea but delivers one of the most powerful films of the year in the process — a lyrical, heartbreaking and haunting journey into the darkness of a brutal reform school in the Jim Crow South.

Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes weren’t working from scratch, but Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel about two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner, who become friends while wards of a juvenile reform school in Florida. It’s called the Nickel Academy in the novel and the film, which is fiction, but based on the horrific abuses at the very real Dozier School for Boys, in the Florida panhandle, where boys were beaten, raped and killed. Some of the bodies were shipped back to their homes. Others were buried in unmarked graves that only have recently come to light.

The haunting truth of the broader picture, the all-too-recent displays of inhumanity and racism, looms over every frame. “Nickel Boys” is not exploitation porn, however. In fact, when one brutal beating does happen, Ross directs his gaze elsewhere: A wall, a shoe, a nervous hand, the corner of a bible. The sounds from the other room, the cracking of the whip and the grunts are undeniable. As in “The Zone of Interest,” we don’t need to see it to feel its impact.

This is more of a memory piece than anything else, a reconciling of unspeakable traumas and human resilience through the eyes of two boys. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is our way in. We see his youth in Tallahassee, growing up with his grandmother Hattie (an especially impactful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor ) who is as playful as she is protective of this young boy who has only her. He’s smart and attuned to the civil rights movement at large, listening in on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches and impressing his teachers, one of whom recommends him for classes at a technical college. He hitches a ride on his way with a man in a slick suit and car, not knowing that it was stolen. When the man is caught Elwood, the innocent, gets sent to Nickel.

“You’re lucky to be in Nickel,” a younger white employee ( Fred Hechinger ) says to Elwood early on. He’s just received his draft notice and might even really believe it. While he seems like perhaps he’s more friend than jailor, his truest nature will be revealed down the line. Others are more sniveling and obvious, like Hamish Linklater as the school’s administrator who is more than ready to dole out violent punishments with his own hands.

It’s not all Black kids in Nickel, but there’s a segregated hierarchy with the students, one that’s neatly tucked away when inspectors come to the grounds as the employees and administrators scurry to present a good face. Even they knew that their practices are something to be ashamed of.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the first-person camera is its attention to details. It’s not acting like a camera, but a person who doesn’t always see everything “important.” Sometimes it’s one’s own hand, sometimes shoes, tattered shirts, darkness, or a puff of smoke.

And while we’d gotten glimpses of Elwood before, in a camera booth with a girlfriend, the first time we really see him is through Turner (Brandon Wilson) one fateful day in the cafeteria. Turner is laid back and a little world weary, an orphan and a realist counterpart to Elwood’s hopeful idealism. Though opposite in sensibility, these two stick together, finding light and joy even in their hellish surroundings. The camera even starts to shift between them — when they’re looking at one another, they’re also looking through the lens, at us. There are also flashes forward to a man at a computer ( Daveed Diggs ), seen mostly from behind, reading about the discoveries of unmarked graves on the grounds.

The threads do come together, but it requires a bit of patience and giving yourself over to the film, which is both formally and emotionally eye-opening. Adapting great literature can sometimes send filmmakers running towards the conventional; Thank goodness Ross charted his own path instead.

“Nickel Boys,” an Amazon MGM release in limited theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “violent content, some strong language, racial slurs, smoking, racism and thematic material.” Running time: 140 minutes. Four stars out of four.

When one thinks of Marvel Comics, a bunch of superheroes come to mind.  From Captain America to Iron Man and Black Widow to Thor, we think of strong, athletic, supernatural beings who look out for and help the little guy (a.k.a. humans).  However, where there are good guys, there are also bad guys…beings like Thanos, Hera, and The Sinister Six.  One member of the latter group, Kraven the Hunter, gained his animalistic-like powers through an accident and some mystical magic.   Stalking those he hunts, some think he is merely a myth, but Spider-Man would disagree (though some think he is also a myth).  Thanks to Sony Pictures, we now get to learn more about this superhuman when Kraven the Hunter comes to theaters this holiday season.

Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson; Bullet Train/Levi Miller; Pan) is the older son of Nikolai (Russel Crowe; Gladiator), a Russian drug lord who is cruel and heartless, even where his children are concerned. When Nikolai pulls the boys out of school after their mother dies, he takes them on a hunting trip to teach them how to “be men”.

While on safari, Sergei gets attacked by “the beast” – an old and powerful lion.  As he lies dying, a young girl named Calypso (Ariana DeBose; West Side Story) gives him a potion and when it mixes with his and the lion’s blood, Sergei becomes miraculously healed and gains super-strengthened heightened senses.  As he grows older, he becomes a mercenary until the day he needs to use his skills to save his younger brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger; Gladiator II/Billy Barratt; Blinded By the Light), from his father’s enemies.

Taylor-Johnson is well cast as Kraven.  Not only does he have the physical characteristics to portray a superhuman, but he also has an intense stare and calm demeanor that is often associated with a predator.  Hechinger comes across as a sniveling baby, similar to the young brother he portrayed in Gladiator II.  Crowe, who has had some wonderful roles in the past, is wasted.  He is more annoying than anything else, but that may partly be due to the script.  DeBose is even more annoying than Crowe and disrupts every scene she is in, but not in a good way.

The script is not well written, with cringe-worthy lines and several plot points all mashed together to try and create something that makes sense.  While it would seem smart to go into deep details of Kraven’s life, much of it is summarized as are the backstories of the other characters.  Even without going into details, the movie is over two hours long and yet offers little in the way of substance.

The production is a mixed bag of well-choreographed action sequences, good stunts, and hit-or-miss CGI.  The stampede is an example of the latter while Kraven’s climbing skills show off the stunt work.  As for the action, if that is the reason you want to see this movie, you won’t be disappointed.

What is most odd about this movie is the way Kraven is portrayed.  In the comics, he is a sort of anti-hero/villain who preys on others, especially Spider-Man. However, in this movie, he comes across as a sympathetic mercenary who only kills those who deserve it (kind of like Dexter).  I’m sure that was a conscious decision by the writers to make him come across as more likable.  Sadly, even with that concession, the film still isn’t great, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone as the release date was pushed back more than once which usually isn’t a good sign.

Grade: C-

The 1972 Summer Olympics opened in Munich, West Germany with 4,000 journalists and 5,000 white doves. It was its first time hosting the Games since you-know-who and the you-know-whats back in 1936. The country hoped to broadcast a message of peace.

Over in the ABC network control booth, however, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the president of the sports division, is more interested in losers. The bloodless procedural “September 5” starts with a scene of Arledge’s ratings genius at work as he orders his crew to cut away from a triumphant winner to their devastated rival. Failure is where you’ll find humanity and fittingly, the Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum has made a breakneck tragedy about one of the 20th century’s biggest failures: the massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in a hostage crisis that starts just minutes into the movie.

Although warned in advance that this exact attack could happen, the Olympic organizers failed to stop the terrorists, and the terrorists in turn failed to force Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to cede to their demands. Meanwhile in the ABC newsroom, Arledge and his colleagues Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) fail to cover the crisis flawlessly, beaming two horrible screw-ups to a live audience of 900 million.

Fehlbaum keeps us focused on the camera crew. Once the first shots are fired, things take off at a sprint. Who’s got a walkie–talkie? Who should anchor? Who spricht Deutsch? The pace stays hectic even when the dash becomes a marathon. Our three leads have three different priorities: Arledge is the humanist; Bader, the ethicist; Mason, the visualist who wants the right images. (“You got it, Kubrick,” one of his men jokes.) Fehlbaum and his co-screenwriters Moritz Binder and Alex David have also concocted a German production assistant (Leonie Benesch) who is promoted to translator and then some, as well as an older German technician (Ferdinand Dörfler) who exists mostly to remind us that the horrors of the 1940s were still very present to anyone over 40. “I still remember exactly what gunshots sound like,” he maintains.

Arledge is a household name with a television career that ranged from the puppet Lamb Chop to “Monday Night Football” and “20/20.” He and Mason share a gold medalist’s drive to compete with the other channels and tend to out-vote Bader two to one. (It’s worth noting here that Bader was the son of Holocaust survivors, although the character is kept too busy to mention it himself.) Mason, who gradually emerges as the central character, has an intuitive sense of when to cut away and when to dissolve. Played in a dissociative fever state by Magaro, he can lose sight of what he might actually be putting on air. (A possible execution of an athlete, for one.) He’s also the youngest of the trio, and you can easily imagine “Network’s” Howard Beale sermonizing about him four years later as the shining example of a TV-weaned generation who worship the tube as “the gospel, the ultimate revelation.”

“September 5” is cut like a modern thriller — it’s all go, go, go — and the cinematographer, Markus Förderer, favors handheld work, as if to stick it to the heavy 1970s cameras that here get laboriously pushed out of the office and up a small hill. The images are so retro-grainy that they look like they were filtered through tweed. Early on while our eyes are still adjusting to the style, the dim bluish lighting and the hectic way people run around grabbing maps and slamming rotary phones almost feel like a send-up of a CIA spy flick. Later, when the gang pokes fun at the local police for attempting to disguise themselves in comical chef hats, it’s momentarily a bleak satire of these Keystone Kops.

Otherwise, this story is strictly contained. There are no close-ups with the victims or the villains or the rest of the German security team that barges into the movie like standard-issue action heroes only to retreat a beat later. There are also no grisly images or passionate arguments that might kick up our own emotions. Instead, Fehlbaum fills the frame with his fetish for tactile objects: stopwatches, soldering irons, stacks of sandwiches, dot-matrix printers. Accustomed to digital effects, we do a double-take when a woman uses her hand to stick the ABC logo on the lens just so.

Fehlbaum is fascinated by how a story gets told and proves the impact of rewinding a shot to play it again in slow motion. The film refuses to stray from the ABC bunker, showing us no more than what the broadcasters have managed to catch on tape via their doggedness and trickery, like forging a fake athlete‘s ID for an employee (Daniel Adeosun) who uses his phony credentials to run reels of film stock back and forth from the sequestered Olympic Village like a one-man relay race. Fehlbaum milks a good amount of tension out of men in headsets barking orders at their desks, although the conceit is harder to pull off once the action moves farther away and news comes in slower and slower.

One of “September 5’s” ironies is that its breathless content creators seem bored by their own product the second they run out of new things to show. If Arledge was still alive, he’d insist on humanizing the movie’s own script. Yet, the coldness is what allows these TV people to do their jobs. Sometimes they barely even seem to understand the updates they’ve been handed until the anchor repeats them on air. When the facts become too painful, the room stands slack for a second and then carries on. (In recent interviews, the real-life Mason has admitted that afterward, he allowed himself a good cry.)

Benjamin Walker’s Peter Jennings has a jaw-dropper of a line about knowing the kill-zone radius of a grenade. “No offense, guys,” he adds, “but you’re Sports. You’re in way over your head.” If this movie had arrived before “Network” and all the media cynicism that’s since come to pass, it would have dropped jaws, too, especially when sportscaster Howard Cosell bleats, “We’re building up to what I think will be quite the climax.”

But now, the TV has trained us to see everything as sports: dating shows, presidential debates, battlefield yards won and lost. Conversely, we tend to demand political endorsements from our entertainment, and the fact that “September 5” stays several football fields away from taking a stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will likely irritate a few people. Better to view it as a film about facing the challenge of not having all the answers. As the veteran newsman Jim McKay sighs: “None of us know what will happen to the course of world history — we don’t know.”