Nomadland is beautiful to look at and Frances McDormand is quietly fab as Fern… but it’s also slow and has a semi-documentary style
Nomadland
Cert: 12A, 1hr 47mins Disney+/Star, available now
Wild Mountain Thyme
Cert: 12A, 1hr 42mins Most platforms, available now
Rating: 
Nomadland may have won three Oscars; three big ones, no less – Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao and Best Actress for its star, Frances McDormand. But all over Britain this week there are going to be living-room conversations beginning with a little sigh and the words: ‘Do you want to give this much longer?’
For like so many Oscar nominees this year – Minari, Sound Of Metal, Judas And The Black Messiah – this is very much an arthouse picture rather than a commercial film.
Yes, the story of a 60-something woman travelling the bleak but photogenic western states in the battered van in which she lives is beautiful to look at. McDormand is quietly fab as Fern, and Zhao does have interesting things to say not just about America’s economic present but its economic past too.
Nomadland may have won three Oscars; three big ones, no less – Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao and Best Actress for its star, Frances McDormand (above)
But it’s also slow, has a semi-documentary style that won’t be for everyone and, although not entirely without hope and positivity, it is definitely on the sad side of poignant.
Deprived of both her home (by economic recession) and her husband (by cancer), it seems to come down to whether Fern has given up on life or whether life has given up on Fern.
Or is it even simpler – might she actually be happier on the road, moving from job to job, living a simple, self-contained life on her own?
Ever since the trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme was released towards the end of last year, the film has been mocked for its wayward Irish accents and cliched cultural stereotypes.
The reality, however, is even stranger, prompting all sorts of questions, the first of which, surely, is ‘What on earth was Emily Blunt thinking?’
But if you think she’s miscast as a beautiful farmer’s daughter, wait until you see – and hear – Christopher Walken as her farmer neighbour, who is not only our Sunset Boulevard-style dead narrator but also the father of her handsome but hopelessly tongue-tied love interest, Anthony (Jamie Dornan).
Extraordinary, but quite possibly bad enough and bonkers enough to become a late-lockdown hit.