Little White Lies #106

The 106th issue of Little White Lies magazine is here.

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.

Little White Lies is a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism to deliver an alternative perspective on the movie-going experience.