Female Film Critics 24/375
This year’s best picture Academy Award winner CODA, 2021 best picture Oscar winner Nomadland and fellow Academy Award winners The Power of the Dog, Encanto, Cruella and West Side Story have met the criteria to receive the ReFrame Stamp.
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Knowing the fascinating backstory of Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland gives audiences additional appreciation of this film’s unique style and universal appeal. Sandie Angulo Chen get the inside scoop from two of the film’s backstory principals, Jessica Bruder who wrote the book behind the adapted script and Bob Wells, a Nomad clan leader who added his own unique voice to the screenplay. Both were mentioned by Chloe Zhao in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. Sandie Angulo Chen chats with Bruder and Wells for their take on Nomadland.
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Anyone who saw director Chloé Zhao’s impressive film, The Rider, expects her imprint to embellish, her choices to be signatory. Zhao’s screenplay, although based on Jessica Bruder’s eye-opening exposé about the lives of older, rootless workers, skews Bruder’s emphasis to Zhao’s. Like The Rider, Nomadland amalgamates documentary with narrative forms of film.
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In this migrant drama, Chloe Zhao paints a subtle portrait of a resilient woman determined to survive despite devastating loss. Widowed, 61 year-old Fern (Frances McDormand) lost everything in the 2008 financial collapse, including her home and her job in now-deserted Empire, Nevada. So she sets out alone across the American West in her ramshackle Ford Econoline van, joining a caravan of modern-day nomads, a rag-tag community, squatting in RV parks.
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The film examines the phenomenon of travelers going across the country in search of work, through the lens of a widow named Fern (McDormand), who lives in her van. Other than co-star David Strathairn, who plays a fellow nomad, the secondary characters are played by real people on the nomad community. McDormand, Zhao, and crew members lived out of vans during production. The result is a film that is beautiful and sad and unique. It will blow you away.
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Chloé Zhao’s acclaimed drama Nomadland, starring Oscar winner Frances McDormand, made its NY premiere on September 26 as the Centerpiece film at the 58th New York Film Festival, Earlier this month, the film was lauded with the Golden Lion this year at the 77th Venice International Film Festival and awarded the Grolsch People’s Choice Award at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival. It is the first film to hold both honors.
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Who but Frances McDormand could take on such mundane tasks as making peanut butter sandwiches, cleaning toilets and packing merchandise into Amazon boxes and transform such moments into a riveting cinematic experience? The two-time Oscar-winning best-actress for 1996’s Fargo and 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is at the top of her game in filmmaker Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland.
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From a short film born out of a job she took just to get by, to an Oscar-winning family drama that reshaped what authentic representation could look like in Hollywood, to a biopic honoring one of the most consequential activists in American history, Siân Heder’s career has been one long argument that people deserve to tell their own stories. With her work, Heder has proved, in all the ways the industry measures success, that those stories are universal, commercial, and Oscar-worthy. We celebrate her commitment to inclusive, nuanced storytelling, and the path she is creating for aspiring female filmmakers who come along behind her.
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The poignant drama Hamnet opens on two trees standing tall and steady, a slow pan revealing their interconnected roots. Grief and memory, compassion and resilience braid throughout this tender film, forging a family’s intimate heartbreak into something universal and layered. Directed by Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), Hamnet adapts Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name dramatizing the family life of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes. Their son, Hamnet, died at age eleven, and both the book and the film connect that shattering loss to the writing of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet, a name used interchangeably with Hamnet at the time.
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Chloé Zhao, Nia DaCosta and Geeta Gandbhir will be honored at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s annual fundraiser, “Celebrating Sundance Institute: A Tribute to Founder Robert Redford,” set for Jan. 23 in Utah. Zhao will receive the annual Trailblazer Award Presented by Google, DaCosta will be presented with the annual Vanguard Award Presented by Acura for Fiction, and Gandbhir will receive the annual Vanguard Award Presented by Acura for Nonfiction.
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