Chloe Zhao's Nomadland mimics life scrupulously...

| May 18, 2021

What's most striking about Nomadland is the almost incidental manner in which it tells its stories - eschewing strident dramatic crises or narrative lurches for something altogether more ambient.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 2, 2021

Not since Robert Redford in All Is Lost has a star performer carried an entire film through wordless looks and glances.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 30, 2021

Frances McDormand delivers a career-best turn in this gently meditative drama about the failure of the American dream.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 30, 2021

Life on the road has never been so tenderly captured, politically alive and profoundly moving.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 30, 2021

Personally, I am fine with the more sentimental moments of Nomadland. Social realism needs the space to contain multitudes and contradictions, just as life does.

| Apr 27, 2021

McDormand masters an unshowy integrity that rarely grates against her less seasoned costars.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 27, 2021

As Fern, [Frances McDormand] pecks at conversation like a bird, and moves like a lizard, holding still as if to conserve energy before darting off suddenly. Her bravest choice is to embody the character's passion without always rendering it palatable.

| Apr 21, 2021

Ii could not have been made anywhere but the United States. The vast expanses of the Western desert, the purple mountains' chilly majesty, provide a stark, flat, unwelcoming setting for the story about retirees and other Americans living in their vans.

| Mar 10, 2021

Nomadland treats its subjects with respect and curiosity. Their misfortunes are not used to objectify or other them, as often happens in movies about an impoverished subculture.

| Mar 5, 2021

There's a genuine and emotional sense of presence as the viewer moves with Fern through the beautifully realized environs of Nomadland.

| Feb 26, 2021

"Nomadland" feels simultaneously like both a memory and a prophecy. Zhao has managed to marry these juxtaposing ideas in her film, which is the essence of bittersweet distilled into an arrow and shot straight through the heart.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 24, 2021

In the end, "Nomadland" delivers a liberal-libertarian longing for a vague, undefined restoration of what was.

| Feb 20, 2021

"Nomadland" is a chronicle of the Great Recession that plays like a quietly thoughtful, real-life "Grapes of Wrath," with McDormand's Fern as its understated Tom Joad - strong, resolute, haunting.

| Feb 20, 2021

That is the challenge of this approach: committing to the [neorealist] aesthetic but relying on a star to carry it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 20, 2021

It's just so deeply felt, moving, meditative, compassionate and beautiful. It's both majestic and kind of mundane.

| Feb 20, 2021

"Nomadland" balances with spine-tingling grace between respect for that restlessness of spirit and longing for a society that has any notion of how to care for it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 20, 2021

Nomadland is achingly beautiful and sad, a profound work of empathy from Zhao. It's a true elegy, a lament for the dead, a yearning for the lost.

| Feb 19, 2021

A road movie like no other, Nomadland is a modest masterpiece like no other. Beautifully unadorned and heart-in-your-mouth stirring, it's leisurely yet urgent, with a singular tone that lies somewhere between elegy and hope.

| Feb 19, 2021

Zhao's movie is really defined by its texture and tone, and there's not a whole lot of meat or momentum to the story. Ultimately, it's a window into a way of life that will seem foreign to most in the modern age.

| Feb 19, 2021