The Close-up

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, director RaMell Ross and cast members Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Fred Hechinger, and Hamish Linklater join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Nickel Boys, the Opening Night selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Nickel Boys screens again on October 3, 5, and 9. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff Rare is the film of a major book that maintains the power and precision of its source material while also generating its own singular aesthetic. Yet RaMell Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida, achieves just this. In breakout performances that cut to the bone, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th centur