Popular reviews

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★½ 52

  when they say "money can't buy happiness" it's meant in a very direct and temporary sense, though it's crucially wrong in that money can unlock security and comfort in ways that can make you happy. but it can't buy freedom.

  wealth is nothing more than a mound of dirt. and from atop that mound you can see so much more than you could from the floor. but you can't stand on top of the mound without it slowly eroding below you, and your fear of returning to the floor demands you feed the mound even more. so you do. but the mound keeps eroding. so you feed it again. but it keeps eroding. so you continue to feed it, at…

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  Review by comrade_yui ½ 339

  every single year we arrive at the shallow end of the filmmaking pool known as awards season, and every single year there's a movie (or several) exactly like nomadland. a touristic faux-docudrama vehicle for the most banal form of misery porn, presenting itself with all the deliberately-adorned signifiers of 'authenticity' and 'deeply-felt emotion' that endear this insidious genre of film to a dishwater-dull critical audience desperate to see any portrait of society that vaguely acknowledges that weird and esoteric concept known as 'economic hardship'.

  given that we're currently in a global depression the likes of which hasn't been seen since the 1930s, you'd figure that it wouldn't be exceedingly difficult for director chloe zhao to articulate at the very least…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★ 4

  one of the best movies ever made that opens with a title card about a reduced demand for sheetrock.

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  Review by Sean Baker 37

  Watched Academy Screener. Breaks my heart to have to watch these films at home.

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★½

  I'm not sure if we have a better nod-and-smiler than Frances McDormand

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  Review by George Civeris ★★★ 25

  One too many deliberate choices to avoid politics of any kind - The weirdly toothless portrayal of Amazon, the way a whole surgery happens without any mention of healthcare, the complete absence of substantial political conversations/debates among people making clearly political decisions, the foregrounding of two fictional characters with well-off families offering them homes against the backdrop of real nomads whose stories are much more interesting... it’s a shame!

  
  The subtitle of the book this is based on is “Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” and it opens with the quote “The capitalists don’t want anyone living off their economic grid.”

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  Review by Kane ★½ 51

  absolutely fucking not!!!!! what a truly vile experience this was. i’ve seen republicans with more respect for the poor. feels like a fucking super bowl ad. Those celebrities singing “Imagine” at the beginning of the pandemic? This is that in movie form.

  i was already suspicious of this movie when in the first few minutes, the main character Fern—a recent widow, gig economy worker and a nomad living out of a van—claims she loves her amazon job because it pays “good money.” (The book was written before Amazon went to $15 an hour!) 

  When I found out that this movie was Frances McDormand cosplaying as a poor person surrounded by people who are actually poor, I was pissed. When I…

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★½ 11

  NYFF 2020: film #12

  “you take care of yourself”

  made with care and so much empathy. every frame is bittersweet and full of tenderness, touching on something hidden deep within the human spirit: the desire to keep moving as a way of survival. i have to comment on the score, which is sparse but moved me to tears every time it made an appearance, gently crashing in emotional waves. this is brilliantly directed by chloé zhao and universal in the most honest way, taking aspects that made the rider great and elevating them to a new level

  in a strange time where we’ve been deprived of so much, left claustrophobic and aching, and experienced some degree of pain, loneliness and longing, this offers a comforting embrace and escape, filling up some of that emptiness with warmth in the form of wide open space. absolutely singular

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★★½ 27

  Third time. A real “What you give to it, it gives to you” film. If you’ve seen a lot of movies, it’s easy to get bogged down in what this wants to be, what it is aesthetically mining. And if you seek clean social morality, this probably isn’t the one. Too ephemeral, too specific, too hooked into the historical American tradition of liberty in the face of fear and the unknown. One long drive to freedom. There’s no judgment and no plan. The politics aren’t political, they’re social and humanistic. There is an evident philosophy that gets a big platform—a nomadic order of decency and connectedness. It’s sensitive but direct about loss—the amazing regret and What if? that powers life…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★ 70

  38

  There's a tension to Nomadland that ultimately fails the movie. It's initially found in the contrast between the docu style, with non-actors utilized for their stories and experiences, and the vanity of the project as a Frances McDormand vehicle. Her performance is quite good, as is David Strathairn, but they're both disconnected from the material. Too often the film is striving for an authenticity that isn't possible with professional actors in the mix. Watching her pretend while the people around her are fully existing in this experience is unsettling. "It should've been a documentary" is usually a reductive statement, but it's true here. Chloé Zhao found a balance with The Rider that was quite moving until it attempted to…

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  Review by kate’s bush ★★★½ 5

  kinda wish a24 distributed this so i could buy frances’ shit bucket on their website

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★½ 7

  "I didn’t want my sailboat to be in the driveway when I died. And it’s not. My sailboat’s out here in the desert."

  so many shots in this movie spark a direct, unfiltered bolt of emotion inside of me but i think the shot of linda may and fern doing the face masks is my favorite one in the entire film. instantly was when i first saw it. screenshotted it, even. i don’t know why, it just moved me. it’s so beautifully framed and such a lovely moment and it makes me really happy to feel this sweet little moment of relaxation and connectedness between these two women. i think about them so often. and about swankie and the birds…