Modern cinephiles often label important Black stories as Oscar bait. While there is some merit to this critique, since we, as audiences, seek cinematic craft alongside historical significance, it’s also a complicated remark. Films like 12 Years a Slave achieve both, while others, such as The Help or Hidden Figures, dilute Black tragedy by centering white savior narratives.

But the fact remains: these stories are not just historical chapters of the past few centuries, they are still painfully relevant. Racial violence did not end with slavery or segregation; it continued in Los Angeles in 1992, in Minneapolis in 2020 when George Floyd was murdered, and in countless modern stories that never made headlines. Until racism ceases to exist, cinema documenting the Black experience must persist.

It's been over 24 hours since I watched Nickel Boys, and I can’t stop thinking about how powerfully it employs perspective. What is cinema if not a tool to create empathy, to allow us to experience the world as others live it, an opportunity to step into someone else's reality? In Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, we experience a man's solitude as he drives through a barren landscape, desperately contemplating his own death while searching for the right person to bury him. Or in Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea, we live inside a grief so paralyzing that it makes its protagonist emotionally unreachable. We aren’t merely ive spectators, we are immersed in lives different from our own, feeling their struggles, their heartbreaks.

What Nickel Boys does with its perspective magnifies this power of cinema to a radical level. It strictly aligns us with its protagonist’s experience. The only time we shift perspectives is when another Nickel Boy takes over, reinforcing the film’s refusal to frame the Black experience through an external gaze. It denies us the viewpoint of those who can, at best, only empathize, refusing to frame injustice through the eyes of an onlooker.

This storytelling driven by perspective reminded me of The Father, which doesn’t just depict memory loss from the grieving eyes of those taking care of its protagonist but instead traps us inside Anthony Hopkins' fractured reality. Because the ones living it has the most real experience of it. Nickel Boys does more than recount history, it forces us to live it. And that, ultimately, is what cinema should do.