A woman in her sixties embarks on a journey through the western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.
Ratings
Curator score: 8.0/10
IMDb: 7.3/10
Letterboxd: 3.82/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
Metacritic: 87
TMDB: 7.2/10
Director
Chloé Zhao
Production
Cor Cordium Productions, Hear/Say Productions, Highwayman Films
Cast
Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May, Swankie, Gay DeForest, Patricia Grier, Angela Reyes, Carl R. Hughes, Douglas G. Soul, Ryan Aquino, Teresa Buchanan, Karie Lynn McDermott Wilder, Brandy Wilber, Makenzie Etcheverry, Bob Wells, Annette Webb, Rachel Bannon, Bryce Bedsworth, Sherita Deni Coker, Merle Redwing
Curator Review
Verdict
A quietly moving, beautifully observed road movie about grief, labor, and the fragile freedom of life on the margins. It’s not a plot-heavy film, but its empathy, landscape work, and lived-in performances make it deeply rewarding if you’re open to a meditative pace.
Best for
viewers who like contemplative character studies
fans of naturalistic performances and nonprofessional actors
people drawn to American road movies and landscape cinema
audiences interested in economic precarity and grief
viewers who prefer mood and observation over plot
Skip if
you want a conventional three-act story
you dislike slow, elliptical pacing
you’re looking for sharp political argument or overt social critique
you prefer highly dramatized emotion or big narrative payoffs
Overview
Nomadland is a film of movement, but not momentum. It follows a woman rebuilding a life after collapse, and the movie’s power comes from how carefully it watches the small routines that make survival feel possible: work, driving, camping, conversation, silence.
Worth noting
Chloé Zhao blends fiction and documentary textures into something that feels both intimate and expansive. The result is less a thesis than a state of being, where the American West becomes a place of loneliness, resilience, and temporary shelter.
Bottom line
Its restraint will frustrate viewers who want explicit politics or a more forceful emotional arc. But for those willing to meet it on its own terms, it’s a tender, haunting portrait of endurance and the uneasy promise of freedom.
Top Letterboxd reviews
demi adejuyigbe (4.5★) · 7016 likes
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… more
comrade_yui (0.5★) · 4297 likes
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… more 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… more
davidehrlich (4★) · 3471 likes
one of the best movies ever made that opens with a title card about a reduced demand for sheetrock.
George Civeris (3★) · 3328 likes
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.”
fran hoepfner (3.5★) · 3249 likes
I'm not sure if we have a better nod-and-smiler than Frances McDormand
2013 · Drama, Adventure · 1h 55m · R · Curator 8.5/10 (234.6K ratings) · Where to watch: fuboTV, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, MGM Plus
A wry, melancholy American journey film that finds humanity in empty spaces and damaged lives.