From “Boy A” (the movie that launched Andrew Garfield’s career) to “Zero for Conduct,” movies set in broken boarding schools and juvenile reformatory centers are a dime a dozen. With “Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross finds fresh colors in such a rigidly codified genre, turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem. The book by Colson Whitehead is brilliant, but much of it you’ve probably seen before on-screen, so Ross strips away as many of the words as possible, searching instead for images to tell the story of Elwood, a Tallahassee teen who’s so much more than a victim of the system.
Except, Ross doesn’t tell the
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