NomadlandMovies like Nomadland
- Key Features:
- Economic hardship, Loss, Grief, Resilience, Community, American West, Self-discovery, Existentialism, Minimalism, Social commentary, Character study
- Tone:
- restrained, poetic, serious
- Target Audience:
- Independent film enthusiasts, Drama lovers, Socially conscious viewers, Character-driven stories
- Emotional Arc:
- Loss → Reflection → Acceptance
Nomadland

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.
Nomadland
Edee, in the aftermath of an unfathomable event, finds herself unable to stay connected to the world she once knew and in the face of that uncertainty, retreats to the magnificent, but unforgiving, wilds of the Rockies. After a local hunter brings her back from the brink of death, she must find a way to live again.

Nola grew up living on a van with her father, Clint; two nomads against the world. When tragedy strikes, Nola must confront the reality of life on the road alone, learning to own her grief, her past and her new destination.

A pistol-packing teen meets an unstable rebel and a cocaine-snorting drifter as she hitchhikes her way out West.

A near-penniless drifter's journey to Alaska in search of work is interrupted when she loses her dog while attempting to shoplift food for it.

In the hazy aftermath of an unimaginable loss, Sarah and Phil come unhinged, recklessly ignoring the repercussions. Phil starts to lose sight of his morals as Sarah puts herself in increasingly dangerous situations, falling deeper into her own fever dream.

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

Rattled by sudden unemployment, a Manhattan couple surveys alternative living options, ultimately deciding to experiment with living on a rural commune where free love rules.

A Swedish immigrant family struggles to adapt to their new life on the American frontier during the second half of the 19th century amidst civil war, native uprising and the lure of gold in California.

A woman embarks on a journey alone across the United States after fleeing from her violent husband.

Pushed to the brink after losing her job, a woman struggles to survive. As the months pass and her troubles deepen, she embarks on a perilous and mysterious journey that threatens to usurp her life.

Self-described misanthrope Elle Reid has her protective bubble burst when her 18-year-old granddaughter, Sage, shows up needing help. The two of them go on a day-long journey that causes Elle to come to terms with her past and Sage to confront her future.

Amid the dust storms and economic depression of Dust Bowl Era Oklahoma, Eugene Evans finds his family farm on the brink of foreclosure. Discovering fugitive bank robber Allison Wells hiding in his small town, he is torn between claiming the bounty on her head and his growing attraction to the seductive criminal.

When a housewife finds out she is pregnant, she runs out of town looking for freedom to reevaluate her life decisions.

Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a survivor and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety.

A nameless drifter navigates a barren landscape punctuated by satellite dishes, radio towers and droning airplanes. Stopping periodically in anonymous hotel rooms, she makes attempts to connect to an unidentified second party.

Mona Bergeron is dead, her frozen body found in a ditch in the French countryside. From this, the film flashes back to the weeks leading up to her death. Through these flashbacks, Mona gradually declines as she travels from place to place, taking odd jobs and staying with whomever will offer her a place to sleep. Mona is fiercely independent, craving freedom over comfort, but it is this desire to be free that will eventually lead to her demise.

A young woman dealing with anorexia meets an unconventional doctor who challenges her to face her condition and embrace life.

Deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a father devoted to raising his six kids with a rigorous physical and intellectual education is forced to leave his paradise and enter the world, beginning a journey that challenges his idea of what it means to be a parent.

The life of a woman is transformed after she is diagnosed with a terminal disease, fired from her job and abandoned by her boyfriend. Given two months to live, she throws caution to the wind to pursue her dreams.

Set in the Mojave Desert, the film follows a broken-down comedian playing clubs across the Southwest, working his way to Los Angeles to meet his estranged daughter.

Set in postwar America, a man watches his seemingly perfect life fall apart as his daughter's new political affiliation threatens to destroy their family.

A 40-year-old loser named Isidoro at the request of his brother drives from Italy to mountainous Carpathian village in Ukraine with a coffin of a diseased Ukrainian worker, who died at a construction site in Italy.

When three women living on the edge of the American frontier are driven mad by harsh pioneer life, the task of saving them falls to the pious, independent-minded Mary Bee Cuddy. Transporting the women by covered wagon to Iowa, she soon realizes just how daunting the journey will be, and employs a low-life drifter, George Briggs, to join her. The unlikely pair and the three women head east, where a waiting minister and his wife have offered to take the women in. But the group first must traverse the harsh Nebraska Territories marked by stark beauty, psychological peril and constant threat.

Faced with the decision of a lifetime, Arvilla Holden enlists her two best friends and sets off in a vintage '66 Bonneville convertible to deliver her late husband's ashes to Santa Barbara.

In 1856, two women forge a close connection despite their isolation on the American frontier.

In an attempt to move on from the death of Paul, the love of her life, Korine leaves Paris to undertake a project in Mongolia. But after meeting the shaman, Oyun, her trip takes a different direction. Korine has a rare gift that Oyun intends to unveil. She agrees to initiate herself in the practice of Shamanism, leading her to discover an ancient and forgotten culture, but most importantly herself.

Two young horse traders guide a Mormon wagon train to the San Juan Valley and encounter rugged terrain, the cutthroat Clegg gang, hospitable Navajo, and moral challenges on the journey.

When his husband unexpectedly dies, Marc's world shatters, sending him and his two best friends on a soul-searching trip to Paris that reveals some hard truths they each needed to face.

A depressed housewife who learns her husband was killed in a car accident the day previously, awakens the next morning to find him alive and well at home, and then awakens the day after to a world in which he is still dead.

In New York City, Thom is broke and jobless, illegally working as a taxi driver. Claire is a successful business-woman, but personally she's in shambles - then comes the phone call that her estranged father is in the hospital. Not knowing what to do, Claire hops in Thom's cab and orders him to just drive and so he does. They find themselves in Pennsylvania and Claire makes the rash decision to drive across the country to California. On the road, there are many detours as the obstacles and secrets force them to learn about themselves and each other.

There's a deficit of good, honest women in the West, and Roy Whitman wants to change that. His solution is to bring a caravan of over 100 mail-order brides from Chicago to California. It will be a long, difficult and dangerous journey for the women. So Whitman hires hardened, cynical Buck Wyatt to be their guide across the inhospitable frontier. But as disaster strikes on the trail, Buck just might discover that these women are stronger than he thinks.

Pan Xiao, a young lawyer, goes to a rural small village settled in the western desert lands of China to handle the case of a falcon poacher who has ran over a policeman. Pan wins the case through sophisticated reasoning and forces the poacher to give him his car as a reward. Then, he just drives back home, but the return will not be an easy one.

A transgender woman takes an unexpected journey when she learns that she had a son, now a teenage runaway hustling on the streets of New York.

A suicidal artist goes into the desert, where he finds his doppelgänger, a homicidal drifter.

Neglected by her husband, Sarah embarks on an impromptu road trip with her young daughter and her best friend, Mindy. Along the way, the dynamic between the two friends intensifies before circumstances force them apart. Years later, Sarah attempts to rebuild their intimate connection in the days before Mindy’s wedding.

An aspiring dancer moves to New York City and becomes caught up in a whirlwind of flighty fair-weather friends, diminishing fortunes and career setbacks.

Once a rising star of the rodeo circuit, and a gifted horse trainer, young cowboy Brady is warned that his riding days are over after a horse crushed his skull at a rodeo. In an attempt to regain control of his own fate, Brady undertakes a search for a new identity and what it means to be a man in the heartland of the United States.

Joe, a down-on-his-luck truck driver haunted by the memory of his deceased wife and child, meets Julie, a spiritually gifted woman who enlists his help in a desperate effort to find the lost soul of her comatose daughter. But the spirit of Joe's dead wife proves stronger, possessing the young woman's body and determined to settle her unfinished business with the living.

Georgia and her boyfriend Sam go on a treacherous journey to escape their country, which is caught in an unexpected war with artificial intelligence. Days away from the arrival of their first child, the couple must face No Man’s Land—a stronghold of the android uprising—in hopes of reaching safety before giving birth.

Remmy and her parents, refugees from Earth, have found peace on the Martian outskirts until strangers appear in the hills beyond their farm. Told as a triptych, the film follows Remmy as she struggles to survive in an uneasy landscape.

In the Old West, a 17-year-old Scottish boy teams up with a mysterious gunman to find the woman with whom he is infatuated.

When a woman visits a Chinese doctor, she discovers her pain is due to pent-up rage, and the only cure is to fully express herself, whatever may come.

After the earthquake of Guilan, a film director and his son travel to the devastated area to search for the actors from the movie the director made there a few years previously. In their search, they see how people who have lost everything in the earthquake still have hope and try to live life to the fullest.

After her boyfriend commits suicide, a young woman attempts to use the unpublished manuscript of a novel and a sum of money he left behind to reinvent her life.

After her mother's death, six-year-old Frida is sent to her uncle's family to live with them in the countryside. But Frida finds it hard to forget her mother and adapt to her new life.

On the run after committing murder, an accountant encounters a strange Native American man who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world.

A recent widow invites her husband's troubled best friend to live with her and her two children. As he gradually turns his life around, he helps the family cope and confront their loss.

After a bad breakup with his girlfriend leaves him heartbroken, Carter Webb moves to Michigan to take care of his ailing grandmother. Once there, he gets mixed up in the lives of the mother and daughters who live across the street.

When a young mother's home birth ends in unfathomable tragedy, she begins a year-long odyssey of mourning that fractures relationships with loved ones in this deeply personal story of a woman learning to live alongside her loss.

Sal Paradise is a young writer whose life is shaken and ultimately redefined by the arrival of Dean Moriarty, a free-spirited, fearless, fast talking Westerner and his girl, Marylou. Traveling cross-country, Sal and Dean venture out on a personal quest for freedom from the conformity and conservatism engulfing them in search of the unknown, themselves, and the pursuit of “it” -- the pure essence of experience.

A woman is taken along with her mother in 1910 to a far-away desert by her husband, and after his passing, is forced to spend the next 59 years of her life hopelessly trying to escape it.

Fed up with her deadbeat grown kids and marginal urban existence, Juanita takes a Greyhound bus to Paper Moon, Montana - where she reinvents herself and finds her mojo.

A young man turns from drug addiction and petty crime to a life redeemed by a discovery of compassion.

In the near future, a weary Logan cares for an ailing Professor X in a hideout on the Mexican border. But Logan's attempts to hide from the world and his legacy are upended when a young mutant arrives, pursued by dark forces.

After a string of abusive relationships, Wanda abandons her family and seeks solace in the company of a petty criminal.

Marleen is in her early 20s, works in a movie theater, still lives at home and is somehow aimless. Her parents torment her with questions about her future and her brother is a high-flyer who has already traveled halfway around the world. When a tragic accident plunges her into sheer endless grief, Marleen just wants to get away. Equipped with the bare essentials, she sets off on a journey into the unknown.

Taking a break from their dreary lives, close friends Thelma and Louise embark on a short weekend trip that ends in unforeseen incriminating circumstances. As fugitives, both women rediscover the strength of their bond and their newfound resilience.

A group of suburban teenagers try to support each other through the difficult task of becoming adults.

After a film production wraps in Peru, an American wrangler decides to stay behind, witnessing how filmmaking affects the locals.

A group of settlers traveling through the Oregon High Desert in 1845 find themselves stranded in harsh conditions.

Kathryn, a struggling actress and unfulfilled housewife, becomes friendly with her new gardener, Ben. He gives her the attention and sensitivity she craves; however, he is not who he seems.

An army ranger and his dog embark on a road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway to attend a friend's funeral.

A woman on the run from the mob is reluctantly accepted in a small Colorado community in exchange for labor, but when a search visits the town, she learns that their support has a price.

After a blow to the head, Abby decides she can't do it anymore. Her life just can't be only about the house, the kids and the wife. She needs more: she needs to be Eleanor.

Grand Canyon revolved around six residents from different backgrounds whose lives intertwine in modern-day Los Angeles. At the center of the film is the unlikely friendship of two men from different races and classes brought together when one finds himself in jeopardy in the other's rough neighborhood.

A woman, thrown into the stay-at-home routine of raising a toddler in the suburbs, slowly embraces the feral power deeply rooted in motherhood, as she becomes increasingly aware of the bizarre and undeniable signs that she may be turning into a dog.

While on a trip to Thailand, a successful American businessman tries to radically change his life. Back in New York, his wife and daughter find their relationship with their live-in Filipino maid changing around them. At the same time, in the Philippines, the maid's family struggles to deal with her absence.

When a man is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he takes custody of his misanthropic teenage son, for whom quality time means getting high, engaging in small-time prostitution, and avoiding his father.

A woman with a tragic past decides to start her new life by hiking for one thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail.

When an alien takes the form of a young widow's husband and asks her to drive him from Wisconsin to Arizona, the government tries to stop them.

Miso lives from day to day by housekeeping. Cigarettes and whiskey are the two things that get her through the day. As cigarette prices and rent start to rise, Miso decides to give up her house for cigarettes and whiskey, leading her to couch surf with old friends while reconsidering her place in life.

Dreams and reality collide as a young woman navigates a tumultuous relationship amid rising social tensions, protests and tragedies in Paris.

In 2013, there are no highways, no I-ways, no dreams of a better tomorrow, only scattered survivors across what was once the United States. Into this apocalyptic wasteland comes an enigmatic drifter with a mule, a knack for Shakespeare, and something yet undiscovered: the power to inspire hope.

Told from the woman's perspective, the story of a couple trying to reclaim the life and love they once knew and pick up the pieces of a past that may be too far gone.

A young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s struggle to come to terms with their personal problems while trying to raise their two children. Based on a novel by Richard Yates.

A young grandmother in a small Pennsylvania town raises her daughter's child after the girl disappears. All the while, a desperate search for her continues.

A black comedy about a farmer who tries to bring home the body of his friend, who died far from their town.

Carrie Watts is living the twilight of her life trapped in an apartment in 1940s Houston, Texas with a controlling daughter-in-law and a hen-pecked son. Her fondest wish – just once before she dies – is to revisit Bountiful, the small Texas town of her youth which she still refers to as "home."

Nineteen year old pioneer woman Marty has recently married. She goes west with her husband Clem, hoping to start a new life. But Clem unexpectedly dies, and Marty finds herself alone, two months pregnant. Widower Clark offers her a marriage of convenience: she needs food and money, and he needs someone to take care of his daughter Missie. She accepts his proposal as a temporary solution.

A young girl discovers a secret map to the dreamworld of Slumberland, and with the help of an eccentric outlaw, she traverses dreams and flees nightmares, with the hope that she will be able to see her late father again.

Following the death of their friend, two girls in their late twenties embark on a road trip to spread his ashes. Seph and Alex take turns driving. Dan is in the glove compartment, in tupperware, decreasing in volume as the trip progresses.

Three strong-willed women strive to forge their own paths amidst the wide-open plains of the American Northwest: a lawyer forced to subdue a troubled client; a wife and mother whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a lonely ranch hand who forms an ambiguous bond with a young law student.

Soon to be a father, Mark feels the pressure of domestic responsibility closing in, so he is more than happy to accept when his old friend Kurt proposes a camping trip in the Oregon wilderness. During their time together, the men come to grips with the changes in their lives and the effect on their relationship.

Two middle-aged men embark on a spiritual journey through Californian wine country. One is an unpublished novelist suffering from depression, and the other is only days away from walking down the aisle.

Follows a young boy who runs away from home in the search of his estranged mother.

Loner Diane Ford is a truck driver with an 11-year-old son, Peter, whom she never sees, and that's fine with her. But, when Peter's father, Len, falls ill, he asks Diane to take care of their son for a while. Eventually, Diane reluctantly agrees, but she quickly realizes that caring for a child interferes with her independent lifestyle - and Peter isn't all that thrilled with the arrangement, either.

When a young rancher crosses paths with a Lakota girl from a nearby reservation, her mysterious disappearance sparks a search that uncovers a harrowing past and hints at a dire future.

A family's getaway to a luxurious rental home takes an ominous turn when a cyberattack knocks out their devices—and two strangers appear at their door.

Columbus has made a habit of running from what scares him. Tallahassee doesn't have fears. If he did, he'd kick their ever-living ass. In a world overrun by zombies, these two are perfectly evolved survivors. But now, they're about to stare down the most terrifying prospect of all: each other.

A pair of working-class brothers flee their Reno Motel after getting involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident.

Following a car accident, which kills her mother, 17-year-old Ida moves in with her estranged aunt and her aunt’s grown sons. The home is filled with physical tenderness and love, but outside of the home, the family leads a violent and criminal life.

Four former harlots try to leave the wild west (Colorado, to be exact) and head north to make a better life for themselves. Unfortunately someone from Cody's past won't let it happen that easily.

A young man with Tourette's Syndrome embarks on a road trip with his recently-deceased mother's ashes.

At a crossroads after her divorce, a schoolteacher ventures toward a fresh start in life — and love — when she signs up for a grueling group hiking trip.

Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and warned to stop drinking. He has few skills and fewer expectations: with a glockenspiel and an accordion, he ekes out a living as a street musician. He befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck and they join his neighbor, Scheitz, an elderly eccentric, when he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin.

A grieving man receives a mysterious, personal invitation to meet with God at a place called 'The Shack'.



