Picture the scene: a cold morning in London’s Soho. Film critics waddle towards the doors of a cinema with their gloves and coats on to waylay a sharp nip in the air. People are seated and relaxed. The lights go down. The film plays. The lights go up. Those same critics stagger breathless towards the exit, not sure how to amply contemplate what they’ve just seen. In the interim, the sun has risen and it’s a little warmer now, so words are shared in the street, words such as “masterpiece,” “what did I just see?” and “have we just witnessed an entirely new cinematic language unfold before us?”

This was a true account of when the LWLies team first clapped eyes on RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, whose formal grace and emotional heft whacked us right on the solar plexus and left us in a daze. We’re so proud to be able to bring you an entire magazine dedicated to this wonderful film – one that we think ranks among 2024’s premium works of cinema. It is adapted from a 2019 novel by the double Pulitzer Prizewinner, Colson Whitehead, about the lives of two young Black men in 1960s Florida whose future has been placed into unnecessary jeopardy by the random pendulum swing of the Jim Crow laws. With aspirations of further education in his sights, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is charged for the crime of car theft purely for being in the wrong place and the wrong time. He is sent to the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school whose educational veneer masks an underside of sordid racist violence and oppression.

As a magazine made by movie lovers, we’re drawn towards examples of exceptional craft, and with its innovative POV cinematography and fluid use of documentary inserts, Nickel Boys very much ticks those boxes. We were turned on to Ross back in 2018 around the release of his stunning debut documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, when he laid down for us a set of his own aesthetic principles, and he expands on that further for our in-depth interview inside this issue. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that as we were about to start work on this issue, the US electorate gave another pedestal to someone whose policies likely seek to perpetuate the grim desolation and abhorrent intolerance that’s plainly stated in this film. Yet we don’t just see Nickel Boys as a film for the moment, but one whose resonances and themes will echo through the ages.

On the cover

We were so proud to commission one of our long-term collaborators, Rumbidzai Savanhu aka marykeepsgoing, to create a special cover for us this issue. Our covers tend to feature portraits of protagonists within the film, and she has created a playful interpretation of this concept whereby we see the back of Elwood’s head, watching his life play-out on TV screens in a shop window – a reference to one of the film’s most affecting shots.

Also in the issue we have incredible new illustrated work from Ngadi Smart, Tomekah George, Joanna Blémont, Xia Gordon, Krystal Quiles and Stéphanie Sergeant.

In the issue

Lead review: Nickel Boys
Sam Bodrojan lauds a harrowing modern masterpiece for its boldness, humanity and formal poetics.

The Interior Self
Leila Latif discovers how filmmaker RaMell Ross made a Pulitzer Prize- winning novel his own.

The Invisible Man
Actor Ethan Herisse on the challenges of sculpting a performance and building a character from behind the camera.

Hard Labour
Leila Latif gets personal with the formidable actor and by-proxy activist, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

Ways of Seeing
Jourdain Searles discovers how cinematographer Jomo Fray refreshed traditional concepts of the camera eye.

Sacred Images
Sophie Monks Kaufman writes in praise of cinema that channels human brutality while rejecting its lurid visual nature.

Community Matters
Rōgan Graham celebrates the world of grassroots advocacy organisations built to promote diversity in cinema.

I See A Darkness
Cheyenne Bart-Stewart speaks to writer/ director Rungano Nyoni about her new film, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.

In the back section

Magic and Loss: the making of Queer
Hannah Strong chats to Luca Guadagnino, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey on how they tangled with the cryptic poetry of William Burroughs in this flighty and emotional new screen adaptation.

Jesse Eisenberg
Darren Richman shares stories of ancestral journeys to Eastern Europe with the writer/director/star of A Real Pain.

Brady Corbet
Keeping it real to the very last second was the main gambit of co-writer/director of The Brutalist, discovered Hannah Strong.

Halina Reijn
Rafa Sales Ross discovers that female desire can be both funny and sexy on screen in her conversation with the writer/director of Babygirl.

Pablo Larraín
The Chilean director lays out his opera credentials to Hannah Strong in this dialogue on his new film Maria, about Maria Callas.

In review

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer
Ruth Beckermann’s Favoriten
Steven Soucey’s Merchant Ivory
Justin Kurzel’s The Order
Michael Gracey’s Better Man
John Crowley’s We Live In Time
Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain
Pinny Grylls and Sam Crain’s Grand Theft Hamlet
Viktor Kossakovsky’s Architecton
Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle
Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist
Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths
Naoko Yamada’s The Colours Within
Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch
Halina Reijn’s Nightbitch
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown
Pablo Larrain’s Maria

Plus – the LWLies top ten films of 2024!

Matt Turner and David Jenkins explore eight recent Home Ents gems, plus we have a postcard from the Tokyo International Film Festival via Hannah Strong, and Marina Ashioti writes in praise of Chantal Ackerman’s Je Tu Il Elle ahead of a major BFI retrospective.

LWLies 105 is available to order now from our online shop. Become a Club LWLies Gold Member or subscribe today to make sure you never miss an issue.

How nice it is to be shown what we rarely ever see. RaMell Ross’ exceptional debut feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a brief, beautiful snapshot of a place and its people, and a rare depiction of ordinary black communal life. The documentary takes the lives of two young men (college basketballer Daniel and new father Quincy) as a starting point from which to draw a loose, lyrical cross section of a community in Hale County, Alabama. Shifting between friends, family and the environment the two men inhabit, it depicts the everyday activities of this small subset of the area’s population with poetic panache.

“Photographing in my day-to-day I began filming, using time to figure out how we’ve come to be seen,” reads the film’s opening intertitle, the first of many used to split the film into segments. These cue cards are dividers, descriptors and directives each used to introduce a line of thought, offer a provocation, or set a mood. “What is the orbit of our dreaming?” another asks. What does regular life in Hale County – a low-income, majority-black neighbourhood, not short of problems, but not needing to be defined by them either – look like? Or rather, what could it look like, were it framed differently?

As Ross himself says, heard off-camera in one scene, “We need more black folks making photos in the area.” So he makes his start on changing the frame, filming for five years and observing life in this place as people live it, without preconception or prejudice. Expertly trimmed back to 78 minutes from some 1,300 hours of rushes, the resulting film takes the form of a series of neatly sequenced, visually varied vignettes that carve out time and space for his subjects to tell their own stories, avoiding the need for overt narrativisation or defined dramatic beats.

Church ceremonies take place, basketball is played, kids play in the streets, a nose is pierced, a bee lands on a leaf, children are born – yet no single event or individual is given primacy. A small child runs back and forth in a living room during an unexpectedly moving long take, while another striking scene sees the camera fixed on a basketball locker room, capturing the flurry of blurry bodies and inaudible chatter within. Smoke rises from a tire fire; the stars appear high in the sky; the sun rises and sets. Small worlds are built as half a decade is compressed into the structure of a single day.

It’s tough to extract a single political or personal position from the film, and no simplistic conclusions can be drawn. Instead, it offers an earnest attempt to deal with how “the plurality of truth of black visuality”, as Ross has termed it, might be best displayed. A bright, bold assemblage of threads, thoughts, images and ideas are proposed, and a multiplicity of perspectives are presented. Hale County This Morning, This Evening is an act of amplification and beautification. It defines the precepts and platitudes of southern black life. Through framing and editing, small moments are imbued with a sense of spiritual grace, and the entirely mundane is recalibrated as the sublime. In this film, representing the routine becomes a radical act.