Flicks, Amanda Jane Robinson
A compassionate Western road odyssey set in the wake of the 2008 recession, Nomadland is a tale for our times with complex politics worth grappling with.
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Nomadland
Frances McDormand leads 2021's big Academy Award-winner as Fern, a woman who loses everything in the Great Recession and embarks on a journey through the American West as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.
Scoring Best Director at both the 2021 Oscars and Golden Globes, this is writer-director Chloe Zhao's follow-up to her critically-acclaimed The Rider (2017). Based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. As with her previous films, Zhao features non-actors in supporting roles. Nomadland premiered at Venice Film Festival 2020.
Best Film, Actress (McDormand) and Director at the 2021 Academy Awards. Best Film, Actress (McDormand), Director and Cinematography winner at the 2021 BAFTAs. Best Film (Drama) and Director winner at the Golden Globes 2021.
2021Rating: M, Nudity108 minsUSA
DramaFestival & Independent
Nomadland / Reviews
Radio New Zealand
If films like this are being made, about characters like this, in situations like this, then maybe all is not lost.
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Slant Magazine
By juxtaposing beautiful vistas filled with promise, a rotted social safety net, and the scrappy itinerant workers navigating the space in between, Zhao generates a gradually swelling tension underneath her film’s somewhat placid surface.
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IndieWire
Nomadland relishes the nomads’ expansive universe, emphasizing the contrast between gaining freedom from society while feeling estranged at the same time.
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Hollywood Reporter
Zhao collaborates with a major-name actor for the first time in Nomadland, guiding Frances McDormand to a remarkable performance of melancholy gravitas, so rigorously unmannered she's indistinguishable from the real-life nomads with whom she shares the screen.
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RogerEbert.com
A movie that finds poetry in the story of a seemingly average woman. It is a gorgeous film that’s alternately dreamlike in the way it captures the beauty of this country and grounded in its story about the kind of person we don’t usually see in movies. I love everything about it.
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Time Magazine
Nomadland isn’t a manifesto — there’s nothing dutifully somber about it. And although it doesn’t romanticize life on the road — for one thing, it shows that you need to be comfortable defecating in a bucket — joyousness is its chief characteristic. Like "The Rider," it’s a window into a specific world, with one key character as a guide.
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Variety
For those on Zhao’s wavelength, the movie is a marvel of empathy and introspection.
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Screen Daily
It’s extraordinary how a work like Nomadland can hold a mirror to society and refract back to the audience the light of their own lives.
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The Guardian
Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.
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The Telegraph
The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech.
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Vulture
Through these characters, Zhao is able to examine the idea of wide-open frontiers without nostalgia or the need to pathologize the parts of our social structures that are eroding or have failed.
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