The Rider, 2017) and featuring Frances McDormand,
Nomadland is a semi-fictionalized reworking of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction work of the same title. (To be more precise, the full title of Bruder’s book is
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.)
The work premiered at the Venice film festival and was then screened at the Toronto film festival. It had a one-week streaming release in December and has already won a number of awards, and is expected to collect more. It is an affecting film, with a typically committed performance by McDormand, but, in our view, the universal critical accolades are overdone. There are elements here that need scrutinizing a little more carefully.