By Lindsey Bahr, Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --“Nickel Boys,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, will open the 62nd New York Film Festival in September, organizers said Monday.
Filmmaker RaMell Ross directed the drama based on the 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in an abusive reform school in Florida in Jim Crow-era Florida. Whitehead used the real Dozier School for Boys, and its victims, as a model. The cast includes Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
“‘Nickel Boys’ signals the emergence of a major filmmaking voice,” said Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, in a statement. “RaMell Ross’ fiction debut, like his previous work in photography and documentary, searches for new ways of seeing and, in so doing, expands the possibilities of visual language. It’s the most audacious American movie I have seen in some time.”
Ross is best known for the documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” which followed Black residents in Alabama’s Hale County and was nominated for an Oscar in 2019. The film, from Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures, will open the festival on Sept. 27 before hitting theaters on Oct. 25.
The New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center, runs through Oct. 14.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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