A24 is known for its prestige arthouse films, but in its early days as a distributor, it made most of its money from elevated horror films like Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar. Over a decade in, the ambitions of A24 and Aster have expanded beyond genre film. But for both, the more recent results have been mixed.

Eddington, Aster’s latest, feels like a continuation of the maximalist guilt-trip Beau Is Afraid. Joaquin Phoenix stars once again, though the concerns here are less Jewish and Oedipal and more wokeness and conspiracy theories. It’s grounded in the contemporary: the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically. The movie’s tagline is “hindsight is 2020,” which is fitting for a movie that is clever and empty.

In a fictional New Mexican town, Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) is unhappy about statewide COVID-19 precautions. He’s not a clean stand-in for any particular kind of conservative; he simply hates wearing a mask, claiming that a KN95 is oppressive as someone who suffers from asthma. Though coronavirus has not arrived in Eddington yet, the anxiety created by mask mandates, grocery lines, and online misinformation loom just as large over the town as the virus itself. Cross doesn’t like what the world has become so he announces on a livestream that he will run for mayor.

Eddington is supposed to be a microcosm of what’s wrong with the US, though Aster’s diagnosis feels overly broad. The film works better when it comes to the finer details. The town is full of weirdos, embodied by a strong and familiar cast: Pedro Pascal plays incumbent mayor Ted Garcia, who’s in the middle of selling out Eddington’s future with the construction of a massive AI data center; Emma Stone plays Cross’ wife Louise, who makes scary dolls as a hobby; Deirdre O’Connell is her mother Dawn, a YouTube-susceptible conspiracy theorist; Austin Butler makes an appearance as Vernon, a cult leader with tattoos that evoke a Hillsong pastor. In some ways, watching the first hour of Eddington feels a bit like watching a Wes Anderson movie or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos’ cruel triptych Kinds of Kindness. The delights come from watching a bunch of recognizable actors inhabit and bounce off odd characters. (You get the sense that they had a good time on set, too.)

As a time capsule of 2020, the movie also confronts Black Lives Matter protests, though the leader of Eddington’s anti-racist movement is a white high schooler (Amélie Hoeferle) who repeatedly gives her ex, a Black police officer named Michael (Micheal Ward), tone-deaf lectures about joining the marches. Two other teenage characters begin protesting mostly because they think she’s hot. Aster finds a lot of his jokes in the grating nature of social justice language.

For all its themes, the early parts of Eddington are light on moralizing or righteousness. Even if the setups are somewhat obvious — the annoying performativeness of the left, the boneheaded ignorance of the right — the punchlines mostly land. Eddington posits that the thing that both sides can agree on is that, progressive or conservative, we are all manipulated by our phones and the incentives of social media. If the idea is obvious, at least Aster pulls it off convincingly.

That is, until the last hour or so. Maybe Aster just struggles with endings? Tonally, Hereditary’s ending works as a de-escalation, though the final twist is unsatisfying; the atrocious last act of Beau Is Afraid is as surreal as it is irritating, with Richard Kind stepping in as a kind of inverse Bing Bong. In Eddington, though, all of the threads that Aster puts into place seem to unravel as Joe Cross’ motivations take an unconvincing, violent turn. Without giving it away, the plot moves in an absurdist direction — a fine choice for a black comedy, but a disappointing one in a film that begins with a more compelling, grounded worldview.

Maybe five years isn’t enough time to understand what exactly the pandemic did to us as individuals or as a society, but I think anyone would suspect that it’s more complicated than “it broke our brains.” If nothing else, Eddington proves that that reasoning is deeply boring on a narrative level. Joe Cross’ unexpected arc, despite Phoenix’s beguiling performance, comes across as confused and unearned.

Eddington is memorable, though. Again, it’s the details. At the police station, an officer’s desktop computer is covered in anime stickers; you catch a brief glimpse of a TikTok video of a white woman doing a celebratory dance after reading Giovanni’s Room. I could be convinced to watch Eddington again just to see all the hilarious, meticulous touches that Aster has embedded in the scenery. As a filmmaker, he demonstrates a strong care for the craft — so much thought has been put into the cinematography, the sets, the evocation of the pandemic. You just wish that same effort had been put into any of the film’s ideas.

Eddington is in theaters nationwide July 18.

Operation Rolling Thunder was meant to be an act of persuasion. The US believed that a drawn-out bombardment would pressure the North to cease its aggression on the South — or, at least, encourage it to ease up. “I saw our bombs as my political resources for negotiating a peace,” President Lyndon Johnson claimed. His framing was belied by the words of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, who said, “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

Rolling Thunder was supposed to take eight weeks. Instead, it lasted more than three and a half years, with hundreds of thousands of sorties. It was longer than any bombing campaign during World War II or any other war that came before; it remains the longest bombing campaign in history. It cost the US $900 million, compared to an estimated $300 million in damage to the North Vietnamese. Given that the conflict continued for another seven years, it’s safe to say that Rolling Thunder was not very persuasive.

Still, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought it could work. Before the war, McNamara had made the unusual choice of leaving his position as the president of Ford Motor Company — at the time, one of the highest-paying jobs in the world  — to work for the White House. He was a numbers guy, who believed that everything could be solved through efficiency metrics. The method was called “scientific management.” That belief in quantification had boosted American corporations; certainly it could do the same for US foreign policy.

Rolling Thunder reflected McNamara’s ambitions and approach toward Vietnam. According to a biography by Deborah Shapley, he saw the bombing campaign “as a balance sheet, with the number of enemy targets hit in one column and measures of enemy activity in the South on the other.” Not coincidentally, many historians see Rolling Thunder as a microcosm for the conflict itself — the hubris of the United States, its inability to understand what kind of war it was getting into. But even if one looked at the strategy on McNamara’s terms, they would see that the numbers offer a glimpse into the size and scope of what true failure looks like.

During Rolling Thunder, between 1965 to 1968, the US dropped 864,000 tons of explosives over Vietnam. We know this precise measurement because the military keeps active and accurate records, which it did for allocations, accountability, and so McNamara could inform policy decisions. For scale, the RMS Titanic weighed about 58,587 tons. The munitions dropped during Rolling Thunder would be the equivalent of nearly 15 Titanics.

But it’s a bit hard to imagine how big a Titanic is, let alone 15 of them. It’s easier to conjure a modern Ford F-150 pickup truck, the country’s most popular automobile, which weighs around 5,000 pounds on average. So imagine the bombs dropped during Rolling Thunder as nearly 344,000 pickup trucks — the kind you’re most likely to see on the road, but hundreds of thousands of them. For context, your average Ikea parking lot has the space for 1,700 automobiles. So envision about 202 Ikea parking lots, completely filled with pickup trucks.

Though Rolling Thunder was primarily a bombing campaign, it was also an early opportunity for the US to flex its air combat superiority. The US deployed variations of an explosive projectile developed by Raytheon, known as the Sparrow, for plane-to-plane encounters. It is now infamous for being a terrible missile — accuracy is an efficiency metric, and the Sparrows were not accurate. Military studies conducted after the war found that only 9.2 percent of Sparrows fired during the war hit their targets. A whopping 66 percent of them malfunctioned; the remaining failures just missed. The batting average of one of the worst hitters of all time, dating back to the beginning of Major League Baseball, belonged to Bill Bergen. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers around the turn of the 20th century and batted about 0.170 — so about two times better than a Sparrow missile. There were plenty of excuses for the Sparrow’s performance: poor training, poor production, poor maintenance. It didn’t change the fact that each missile may have cost as much as $225,000, which, after inflation, would be $2.3 million a piece today.

But McNamara’s favorite efficiency metric was “loss exchange ratio.” It is the simple math of determining the quantitative relationship between how many you lost to how many they lost. That figure asks: what is the value of a life? You could determine the average price of saving a life to determine a human being’s worth. Conversely, as the military does, you can calculate how much it costs to kill them. The formula is straightforward: how much you spent divided by the number of deaths. If this sounds blunt, it is exactly the equation the US used. Loss exchange ratio is better known as kill ratio.

Being a man of “cool efficiency,” as he called himself, McNamara had an advantage in continuing to push through these doomed plans. One aide described him as being forceful and convincing. In meetings, McNamara arrived with “briefs, numbers, ratios, estimates, and projections.” (The same aide also described him as “exhausting.”) Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, described encounters with the defense secretary as being “bombarded.”

It’s why the explosives kept falling, even as the numbers didn’t look great for Rolling Thunder. The most generous estimate of casualties claims that 21,000 enemy combatants were killed, meaning that, after spending $900 million, each one cost the US around $42,857. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s $9.2 billion — so $438,095 per life. Again, not very efficient.) McNamara considered body count to be the most precise, objective metric for success, but at no point did that factor in the more than 182,000 civilians killed during Rolling Thunder.

That was just during the three-year span of Rolling Thunder. Over the course of the two decades the US military was in Vietnam, the US dropped an estimated 5 million tons of explosives. That’s twice as much as during the entirety of World War II, and it remains, to this day, the largest bombardment of any single country ever.

Five million tons of bombs, or if it’s easier to imagine, 85 Titanics.

The best way to honor the dead was with a competition. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund asked, who could design the best war memorial? The requirements were sparse: it must use the names of the lost soldiers; it must be “reflective” and “harmonious” while making “no political statement of the war.” The competition opened in the fall of 1980, and submissions were blind judged. Every entry was given a number rather than a name. There were 1,421 proposals, and a jury of eight unanimously chose the winner: entry #1026.

Maya Lin was 21 years old and studying architecture as an undergraduate at Yale University. She’d already been thinking about death. Earlier, for a class, she’d designed a memorial for an imagined World War III; she turned in a drawing of an underground tomb, a concept that deeply upset her professor. For the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition, she sketched a cut in the earth; a sunken, black stone listing the soldiers’ names and nothing more. “​​The need for the names to be on the memorial would become the memorial; there was no need to embellish the design further,” she said.

Lin was surprised to win the competition. She’d submitted it in a college class and received a B. (No matter, her professor had entered the competition and lost.) Being entry #1026 had obfuscated the fact that she was Chinese American from the judges, but once her proposal was announced to the public, there were concerns that the memorial should not be designed by someone of Asian descent. Lin spent several tortuous months in Washington, DC, overseeing the project, enduring criticism of her design from all sides. She recalls one Washington Post op-ed dubbing her work “an Asian memorial for an Asian war.” (She was born in Ohio.)

As Lin’s work moved through a bureaucratic approval process, other design choices were called into question. One crucial facet of Lin’s idea was to list the names chronologically; veterans groups resisted the idea, saying it would be difficult for visitors to find the exact location of where a soldier was honored. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to list names alphabetically? But Lin fought hard to preserve the chronology, and she prevailed in the end: an honest accounting of death over a convenient one. The memorial would live firmly in time, rather than outside of it.

There was pushback on the color, as well. “One needs no artistic education to see this design for what it is: a black trench that scars the Mall. Black walls, the universal color of shame and sorrow and degradation,” said veteran Tom Carhart. In an essay for the New York Review of Books many years later, Lin defended her choice. “I do not think I thought of the color black as a color, more as the idea of a dark mirror into a shadowed mirrored image of the space, a space we cannot enter and from which the names separate us, an interface between the world of the living and the world of the dead,” she wrote. The prompt had asked for “reflective” — the black granite was quite literally reflective.

Unconvinced, Carhart and other critics suggested the wall be made white and adorned with a more conventional eight-foot-tall statue of wounded soldiers. Plus, they wanted a flag right in the center. Lin objected, claiming the additions violated the integrity of the work. The US Commission of Fine Arts, which had final say, heard arguments in favor of and against Lin’s design, and eventually settled on a compromise: Lin’s vision would remain intact, but  a statue and a flag would be added — not in the center, but off to the side. No one informed Lin of the additions, and only after reading about it in the paper did she learn her vision would be undermined. (“They didn’t have the stomach to tell me,” she said.) The memorial was completed and dedicated in November 1982, but by that point, Lin had already left Washington.

In a city that is full of bright white neoclassical statues and monuments, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an unabashed piece of the land art movement, appearing almost like a dark gash carved into the ground. Lin even said she wanted it to look like a “wound that is closed and healing,” but the fact remains that black granite is a static material, a hard rock that is as close to permanence as we have on this planet.

The names set in the stone are cast in the typeface Optima. (Decades later, John McCain would deploy the same type in his presidential campaign logo.) Every name on the memorial is the same size, giving equal weight to each life, regardless of military rank. There are 58,395 names in total, representing the soldiers that were killed or missing in action from 1956 to 1975. For scale, if you met an average of two new people a day, every day — an incredible social clip — you would encounter only 55,518 people, assuming you lived to the American average age of 76. More than a lifetime’s worth lost, now memorialized as a small name chiseled into a slab of granite.

That death toll has become a strange marker to convey magnitudes of loss: for traffic accidents, gun violence, and other wars. During the pandemic, several outlets noted when the number of people killed by COVID-19 surpassed the fatalities of US soldiers during the Vietnam War. This is perhaps the legacy of Robert McNamara: an emphasis on body count, the metrics-driven approach to understanding death.

But even just looking at the numbers, there is the erasure of a greater figure: the 3.8 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians that were killed during the war. That’s roughly the current population of Berlin or Los Angeles.

McNamara used the kill ratio as the key metric for the war, guiding many of his policy recommendations. The 58,000 Americans killed compared to the 3.8 million Vietnamese killed brings the kill ratio to a staggering 1 to 65.

Maybe it’s easier to imagine that ratio in other terms: a double espresso shot compared to a gallon of milk; the Scoville difference between a common serrano chile and a ghost pepper. 

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial stretches for 400 feet. One built for non-Americans lost with the same density of names would stretch for nearly five miles.

The remnants of the war are scattered everywhere across Vietnam. This manifests, in the most literal sense, as unexploded ordnance. These leftover explosives are still littered across the entire country. The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress could carry up to 108 bombs, each of which would then disperse as many as 600 tennis ball-sized “bomblets,” destroying everything in an area that was one mile long and half a mile wide. When one of McNamara’s deputies asked why the US deployed B-52s — a plane famous for its devastating power and lack of precision — Gen. William E. DePuy delivered the answer calmly and honestly: “because they’re there.”

This technique is called “carpet bombing” because it affects a large area, the way a carpet might cover a floor. The most famous ones were during World War II: Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo. As recently as 2023, the US has controversially sold cluster bombs to Ukraine. But their usage was never more intense than they were over the 43 square miles of Quảng Trị, a rural province in Vietnam that was so thoroughly leveled that only 11 of its 3,500 villages were left alone by 1975. Quảng Trị has been dubbed “the most bombed place on Earth.”

While cluster bombs are an efficient way to annihilate large areas of land, the adorably named bomblets have a high failure rate as high as 30 percent. After the war, millions of dud cluster bomblets remain scattered across the country. Since the war ended in 1975, they have killed or injured more than 100,000 people. Estimates indicate that 17 percent of the entire country is still contaminated by leftover explosives — millions and millions of more bombs.

Several nonprofits, like Project Renew and the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), are dedicated to ordnance removal. They employ locals to survey large, often forested areas; teams of deminers locate explosives with off-the-shelf metal detectors. The work pays the equivalent of $500 a month, which is more than double Vietnam’s minimum wage. A team of 14 clears approximately 38,750 square feet a day — about half a professional soccer field. At that rate, it takes almost a year of sustained work to clear the area of a single cluster bomb. One of the hundred dropped from a B-52 would have taken about 30 seconds to reach the ground, and decades later, it would require more than 40,000 hours of human labor to clean up.

While it may sound like a dangerous job, heavy training and stringent safety precautions have resulted in very few accidents or injuries. At the end of each day, the unexploded ordnance are gathered and safely exploded. Project Renew says it has detonated more than 815,000 of them so far, while MAG has detonated another 400,000. The work in Quảng Trị, where the problem is the worst, hopes to be entirely clear by 2035, 60 years after the end of the war.

Still, as of 2024, at least half a million hectares of land in Vietnam have been cleared. The remaining area that needs to be cleared is another 6.6 million hectares. That means after half a century, only 7.6 percent of the contaminated areas have been deemed safe and ordnance-free.

At least one estimate suggests that it will be another hundred years of sustained work before Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia can be decontaminated of explosives; doing that math is hard, because it depends on so many variables, including the consistency of funding. The US has given $750 million for the cleanup effort, which seems like a large sum until you realize that the country spent $352 billion ($2.2 trillion after inflation) on the war effort. Earlier this year, the Trump administration suspended funding for bomb removal in Vietnam. Given the size of the issue, and how much progress has been made in five decades, it’s difficult to imagine a bomb-free Vietnam in the next 500 years — unless the current pace is significantly accelerated. The goal, according to a MAG representative, is to be “impact free” — that is, land safe enough to be developed, for communities and economies to flourish. Being impact-free is not the same as a total absence of bombs: Vietnam will never be close to completely clear.

When something is so big, it tends to become abstracted, simply so our minds can grasp them. This is normal. We abstract many of the things that are important to us: money, time, life. We only imagine things — value and worth — in relation to other things. What is 7.6 percent? That would be equivalent to running a marathon and quitting after the second mile. Or starting a two-hour-long horror movie and deciding it’s too scary less than 10 minutes in. Or living to kindergarten age in an average human lifespan.

I say all this, of course, just for an idea of proportion, for a sense of scale.

RaMell Ross considers himself more of a visual artist than a movie director. His second film, Nickel Boys, attempts a visual artist’s feat: a feature shot entirely from the first-person point of view.

Every decade, it seems, first-person camerawork reemerges in film. Kathryn Bigelow’s dystopian thriller Strange Days (1995) cut to it when its characters deployed a sci-fi technology to experience other people’s memories; the much-maligned Doom (2005) had a section that paid homage to the POV of its video game origins; Hardcore Henry (2015) proved doing that at feature-length was exhausting. But if there’s a through line between the works that have deployed the first-person perspective, it’s that they’ve used them for visceral means, often to heighten the intensity of violence.

Nearly 10 years later, Nickel Boys presents the first person to achieve the opposite: quiet intimacy. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film alternates between the perspectives of its leads, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two Black teenagers who meet at a brutal reformatory school in the Jim Crow South. Despite the institution’s punishing environment, Elwood continues to maintain an optimistic worldview reflective of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, while Turner grounds himself through pragmatic survivalism. The audience sees what they see — and believe.

The first-person vantage point does something clever: when we’re seeing things through Elwood’s eyes, we’re mostly looking at Turner, and vice versa. The effect is startling and, in its best moments, sublime. And the film is so confident that it almost never relents. Nickel Boys commits to the first person for nearly its entire two-hour, 20-minute runtime, except for a few splashes of archival footage and a handful of scenes that flash forward. But the brilliance of Nickel Boys is that the camerawork isn’t just a visual gimmick; it’s tied so deeply to the film’s themes that it allows the film to pull off a final act reveal that, before I saw this adaptation, I believed could only be achieved in a novel.

The movie arrives in theaters this Friday, but thanks to a strong run at festivals, it’s already being talked about as an Academy Award contender. (As of this writing, Nate Jones’ most recent “Oscar Futures” column at Vulture predicts the film as a Best Picture and Best Director finalist.) A New York Times critic declared it the year’s number one film, and director Ross just took home honors at the New York Film Critics Circle, an award that tends to be a bellwether for the industry’s biggest prizes.

The year’s most celebrated movie might just be its most ambitious. Asking audiences to watch a film from the first-person POV is a big risk, and the technical challenges to pull it off convincingly were no easy ask of the crew or actors. In some ways, Nickel Boys feels like an unlikely gambit.

Here’s how it got made.

A photographer and author, RaMell Ross comes from the art world, a place that, in his experience, embraces and elevates abstraction over explanation. Working in film, he says he finds that people — the regular ones that watch movies and the powerful ones that allow them to be made — tend to ask more questions about intention and meaning.

As a director, Ross is best known for his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which follows the life of two Black high school students in Alabama, where Ross spent five years capturing footage.

Hale County eschewed the traditional building blocks of narrative — plot through an order of scenes — for a fragmentary, patchwork approach. The result is stunning and resembles less a conventional documentary and more the kind of impressionistic video art you might find at a contemporary art museum. But even with all its formal invention, Hale County still earned an Academy Award nomination in the documentary feature category.

It lost to Free Solo, but still: not a bad showing for a movie never expected to be in the running. After, Ross was compelled to return to his work in visual arts, completing a performance piece for the Ogden Museum of Southern Art titled “Return to Origin,” wherein he shipped himself from Rhode Island to Alabama in a large wooden crate — an allusion and reversal of the Great Migration, made a touch funnier when you learn Ross is six-feet, six-inches tall.

During that time, he’d also returned to his full-time job, teaching visual arts at Brown University. It’s unsurprising to learn that Ross is a professor — even from our brief encounter, it’s clear he possesses an academic’s curiosity and the enthusiastic engagement of a lecturer. More importantly, teaching gives him the space to be patient. “I get to make art at my own pace. I get to think big and move slow. There’s nothing better than that.”

But having come within spitting distance of Hollywood’s highest recognition, the Oscar, surely producers and studios were reaching out to Ross with projects, right? It turns out that no one was calling. Sundance recognition and an Academy Award nod would have to suffice. “I never took a meeting,” he says, appearing content with that outcome.

Then, in 2019, a producer reached out about an adaptation of a not-yet-published novel called Nickel Boys.

Ross had heard of the production company Plan B before. But it wasn’t until they reached out that he looked them up: they’d made 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight. It was Brad Pitt’s production outfit. High-profile producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner were also involved, but honestly, Ross wasn’t familiar with the kind of names that circulate among Hollywood regulars. He’d made little effort to penetrate that world because, well, he liked his life, teaching and making art at his own speed.

But after reading an advanced copy of Nickel Boys, the idea of POV came immediately. Whitehead’s book fictionalizes the very real horrors of the Dozier School for Boys, where, only recently, forensic anthropologists have uncovered nearly 50 unmarked graves of students who were secretly buried. In imagining those harrowing details, Ross was at a loss for words, but he could conjure the images. What if he could give those boys a literal point of view?

He had no idea if Plan B would be up for such a formal gambit, but he had no interest in being a for-hire director. What did he have to lose? When Ross pitched the idea to Plan B, he was surprised when they immediately signed off on it.

“They genuinely did not flinch. They stress-tested it, as all the producers did over the course of making the film and really whittled down the script, but generally never questioned [the first-person approach],” Ross says, then adds: “Kind of crazy.”

He’d connected with cinematographer Jomo Fray, a fan of Hale County. But even Fray, who came with his own awards and bona fides, found that the POV of Nickel Boys required him to rethink the language of film “on a quantum level.” The two of them were suddenly reconceiving the basic elements of the medium: What is an establishing shot when you’re in first person? A cut? A transition? The prospect was daunting — and thrilling.

But first, there was a lot of testing — a month’s worth, just to get the feel right. Ross recalls specifically homing in on how they wanted time to move with the camera. What they learned is that the most convincing images had to be slightly behind their marks. Traditionally, a movie is tightly blocked and choreographed with the camera; but in their trials, Ross and Fray found the results unrealistic. Messiness, they found, was more convincing. “If you are late to something and then you find it… then it just fundamentally feels more like human vision.” The way a person sees the world is not as tidy as it is in cinema. To avoid making the POV feel like a contrivance, the image had to be deeply immersive, one “that allowed you to live life concurrently with Elwood and Turner… navigating and moving through space with them, not merely watching them do it,” Fray says.

It also required some special gear. Fray chose the Sony Venice, a full-frame digital camera, because it could shoot in IMAX quality. In “Rialto mode,” which separates the body from the 6K sensor, the footprint of what the camera operator is holding was barely larger than an average DSLR. (Fray knew from what Ross had imagined they would often be filming in tight spaces.) There were a lot of setups, too: chest mounts, helmet cams, SnorriCams (the exoskeletal selfie stick rig that produces shots most associated with Darren Aronofsky’s work); there were handhelds in various orientations; a scene where Elwood gets clocked required its own custom rig.

But what does shooting an entire movie in first person actually look like? Well, it involves the camera crew and the actors getting unusually close. There were times when they were actually on top of each other.

Most of the shots were filmed by Ross, Fray, and camera operator Sam Ellison. If the scene was from Elwood’s POV, Herisse would stand close behind the camera operator and say his lines; if a Turner scene needed a hand in it, Wilson would reach his arm around the camera operator to get himself into shot. “We’re making a frame and we’re like, ‘Hey, E, put your hand up here a little bit more,’” Ross says.

There were many scenes — Ross estimates about a quarter of the shots — where the limitations of space meant the actors needed to don the camera rigs themselves.

“You don’t really get that opportunity really as an actor, to work behind the camera and then step into the shoes of an operator for certain moments,” Herisse says. Suddenly, he had the opportunity to wield an object he didn’t normally interact with, which he was always told he was supposed to ignore the presence of. Was it stressful? 

“Obviously it’s scary in the sense that I didn’t want to break anything. I definitely know that this is a very important and expensive piece of equipment that’s hanging off my chest,” he says. “But otherwise, it was so cool.”

For him and his co-star Wilson, shooting scenes from the other side of the POV meant violating the most basic rule of acting: never look at the camera. Now, they were instructed to speak directly into it. When I speak to Herisse and Wilson, I ask if it was hard to shift their focus.

“We definitely couldn’t ignore [the camera]. But we were able to get into a rhythm with it and learn that new thing of staring down the barrel of the lens in place of having each other’s eyes or each other’s physical presence,” Wilson says.

“Eventually the camera just fades away and you get this feeling that you’re no longer speaking to this machine,” Herisse adds. “Brandon was there physically — right next to Jomo or Sam or RaMell during the scenes — and I could hear his voice. And I knew that he was there with me.”

They were still listening to each other, even if a 6K camera rig and its operator stood between them.

Toward the end of our conversation, I tell Ross that shooting Nickel Boys sounded extremely difficult — reinventing the language of film, coming up with the technical way to do that, then executing on that ambitious vision. But Ross just laughs it off.

“The hardest part is time in general because you don’t have infinite time, like in documentary where you can just come back. So we have two hours to shoot the scene and we’re starting from scratch. [The actor] doesn’t have the rig on. Bluetooth isn’t connecting. Those types of things make it challenging, but the images themselves, yeah, we had that.”

After rushing through eight or so weeks of preproduction, shooting was compressed to a month after losing a week to covid — an intense experience for a guy who spent the better part of a decade on his last film.

Preparation helped, though. Ross estimates that 90 percent of what he storyboarded and scripted shows up exactly that way in the final thing, with only a little bit of improvisation along the way. I’m surprised to hear the shot list was a whopping 35 pages, single-spaced — every single moment, gaze, and beat accounted for, in a film that still feels naturalistic.

It’s easy to see how Ross’ newest film is a clear extension of his body of work. If Hale County was, in his words, the story of how Black people have come to be known through the camera, Nickel Boys offers a story where the perspective of Black characters becomes the camera.

Nickel Boys is structured along more conventional plot lines (it even has a big twist), but the film also offers many reprieves and distractions, emulating the way the eye wanders and how memory can often be nonlinear. Some of those images are the most resonant: the first shot opens with an outstretched arm, gripping an orange; sensory fascinations, like the sound of loafers clopping through a puddle or a knife scraping cake off a dish, take center stage. 

One of the movie’s most moving moments is a humble one: actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor embracing Turner for a hug, the camera suddenly looking past her shoulder.

Recalling that day on set, Fray describes it as a new experience for him as a cinematographer. No longer the voyeur, he was suddenly in a position where he had to meet his scene partner in the eye.

“That changes how you compose an image,” Fray says. “That changes how you shoot an image. And I think that changes the dynamic between actor and camera, and cinematographer and performer.”

Nickel Boys is in theaters on December 13th.

The Wimbledon Championships, the most prestigious of professional tennis events, declared it would no longer use human line judges at next year’s tournament. In 2025, the London event will use an electronic line-calling system (ELC) instead.

First reported in The Times of London, the announcement marks a radical change to a 147-year-old tradition, albeit one that’s on trend with the sport’s broad shift toward technology-assisted officiating. In 2023, the Association of Tennis Professionals announced all of its events would move toward automating line calls, and two of the four Slams have already incorporated it. With Wimbledon going with ELC, the last holdout is the French Open.

In the past, a court was monitored by as many as nine line judges, each tasked with determining if a ball is in or out in their assigned lane. According to the same The Times article, Wimbledon employs 300 judges covering over 600 matches during the two-week event. But the embrace of computer systems is not reflective of a desire to reduce staff (the automated system still requires a lot of people in a booth). Instead, ELC systems are believed to improve accuracy — a belief widely held especially among players not named Jelena Ostapenko.

Last month, I published a story about the history of electronic line calling in tennis, focusing on the most popular implementation, Hawk-Eye Live. The technology, which uses a system of ten to twelve cameras around the court, actually determines where a ball will land depending on its trajectory. Originally, Hawk-Eye was introduced as a fun accessory for broadcasts to show line calls rather than a guidance for officiating. But after an infamous 2004 US Open match between Serena Williams and Jennifer Capriati revealed a number of obviously erroneous calls — to a large TV audience at home, no less — the organizing bodies of tennis moved to deploy Hawk-Eye as a tool that could be used by players to challenge line judges. Two decades later, Hawk-Eye calling is so dependable that it is automated at the US Open; players don’t even have to ask for it now.

During a match, ELC systems capture huge swaths of data: not just the ball at 70 frames per second of every second of a match, but also the player movements as well. This provides a lot of stats for broadcasters during the match, as well as a wealth of information back to the players to assess their performance after. But there’s perhaps a less expected, and more lucrative, use case as well: selling that data to sports betting companies.

There’s an entire pipeline of data and licenses that allows apps like DraftKings or FanDuel to derive betting odds from a ball- and player-tracking system, and it also enables organizations like the Association of Tennis Professionals to profit from the booming sports betting industry indirectly. (Some level of obfuscation is required — making money directly from gambling could compromise the integrity of the sport.) In my reporting, I learned that the Association of Tennis Professionals makes as much money from licensing ball and player tracking data as it does selling its broadcast rights. Wimbledon will likely make a pretty penny too, once it moves to an ELC system next summer.

As a spectator, I have personally started to miss the days when Hawk-Eye was used as a challenge system rather than an automated source of officiating. If a player felt confident that a line judge was wrong, they could dispute it. The chair ump would summon Hawk-Eye, and through a dramatic build up — for the officials, the players, and the audience — the location of the ball would be revealed, and a call upheld or overturned. The result could change the course of a match. Personally, I find it hard to resist such great drama!

We still have forms of this in other sports. Is anything more fun than when an NFL coach drops a red flag to contest whether a wide receiver had control of the ball? But whereas the rules of professional football still have shockingly squishy ideas of what a catch is, things are more rigid in tennis. A ball is either in or it’s out. And as the sport moves toward a technological solution to make its officiating decisions, soon line judges will be out too.

The release of Get Out in 2017 disturbed Hollywood — not just the box office but, briefly, the entire horror genre, which had long been the most consistent moneymaker in the industry. The film made a multiple of 56 times on its $4.5 million budget and was less a breakthrough and more of a victory lap for Blumhouse, the studio that had for nearly two decades championed scary movies at a low cost with hopes of a high return.

Partly, Get Out was exceptional — not the first movie where the true horror is racism, but one that balanced the terror with humor and absurdity. Eager to repeat that success, Hollywood greenlit a swath of horror movies about racism. Many of them were underwhelming and, in some cases, appalling. Mostly, it was exhausting to see so much repetition in a genre that thrives on novelty. But at least these movies were about something. Now we’re onto the next wave of horror films, which have trended toward being about nothing.

This summer’s three biggest relatively high-brow, low-budget horror films — Maxxxine, Longlegs, and Cuckoo — represent a move toward big moods rather than big ideas. They also represent a wasted opportunity. All three traffic in atmosphere rather than actual scares. A horror movie doesn’t have to be smart to be enjoyable, but is it unfair to ask them to at least not be so dim?

(Some light spoilers to follow.)

Of the bunch, MaXXXine gets the closest to having an idea. Closing out director Ti West’s X trilogy, Mia Goth, who stars in all three, plays an adult film actress who lands a role in a Hollywood movie. The best scene comes early: after being threatened by a man in a dark alley, Maxine pulls out a gun and reverses the power dynamic. She forces the would-be assailant to strip, then crushes his balls with a stiletto heel — rendered briefly on screen, as grotesque and violent as anything you’ll see all summer. The theater gasped, groaned, and laughed. It was truly the stuff of great horror movies. But even more, it also suggested MaXXXine would go in a fascinating, transgressive direction: that perhaps this kind of absurd brutality could be justified in the moral universe of the film.

Disappointingly, it quickly runs in another direction. Whereas the first two films of the X series find their thrills and creativity in budget restraint, MaXXXine is a high-production affair, with much of that money seemingly used to remind you that it’s set in the ’80s. But gone are the charming homages of X or the strange turns of Pearl. MaXXXine shies away from the conceit it appears to be setting up in its first act — true ambition as savagery. Sadly, after the ball-crushing scene, the rest of the movie is figuratively bloodless.

(If you think I’m being too harsh, I offer you a review of MaXXXine by my colleague Charles as a counterpoint.)

Meanwhile Longlegs, a box office surprise (and studio Neon’s biggest opening ever), never even bothers to be about anything. Even with a straightforward setup about an FBI agent tracking down a serial killer, the movie’s best attempts at creating narrative tension amount to incoherence. Characters say stuff like, “You’re not afraid of a little bit of dark because you are the dark.” Come on.

To its credit, Longlegs is the prettiest movie of the bunch. Moody and occasionally spooky, director Osgood Perkins sure knows how to compose a shot that makes the air feel thick. But it uses its runtime to gesture toward themes (parenting, trauma, maybe 9/11?) rather than explore them, and several disparate plot elements (Satan, a bunch of handmade dolls, a main character with ESP) never really intersect in a way that bothers to make sense.

There are things to like about Cuckoo, out this weekend, which situates itself on a remote cabin resort in the German Alps. It rests on familiar tropes: a girl in a new town (Hunter Schafer), locals who act strange, a seemingly friendly scientist type (Dan Stevens). Schafer and Stevens appear to be having tremendous fun running around a saturation-blasted set, and there is at least one clever scare involving a bicycle chase. But even when the film reveals the mystery behind its namesake — a turn that, without giving anything away, is somehow both predictable and still vague — it’s clear that even two strong performances can’t compensate for characters that have little motivation and stand for nothing. Instead, Cuckoo, like MaXXXine and Longlegs, are best enjoyed as exercises in cinematography.

Recently, I encountered a miniseries from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for two horror masterpieces, Pulse and Cure. The show, Penance, was released in Japan in 2012 and is now streaming on Mubi. Knowing little about it other than the pedigree of its director, I was stunned by the way it looks. Pulse and Cure are meticulously filmed; an emphasis on dark and deep shadows, especially for interior scenes, creates a claustrophobic setting for its characters and viewers. Penance, by contrast, is shot like a cheap soap opera — brightly and dully lit, that off-putting veneer of a high frame rate. It’s quite ugly to look at, yet still so eerie. Through careful framing and tight editing, Kurosawa is able to oppress the viewer with so much dread even without the haunted lens of his films.

More than that though, Penance leans heavily on its conceit: a young girl is murdered in a small town, and the four friends who met the killer cannot recall his face. The mother tells the friends that she will never forgive them, and each episode leaps 15 years ahead to see what has become of each of their lives. Kurosawa’s miniseries always points back at a single idea: can a person ever escape their guilt?

Despite being uneven in places, Penance always feels like it’s structurally and thematically consistent, whereas this summer’s lineup of horror movies — MaXXXine, Longlegs, Cuckoo — don’t have anything to say because they never started with a real question. You might have a good time at the theater, but very little of those films will linger.