Movies this week: Oscar favorite ‘Nomadland’ on the (really) big screen, ‘Coming 2 America’ teases
Frances McDormand stars in the film “Nomadland.” (Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2020 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved)
This was the week when annual movie awards season really geared up, with nominations from the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild. While the former is a bit of a racket and taken way more seriously than it should be, these things are pretty good tips to where the Oscar race — delayed by COVID this year — is headed.
Sharing in their bounty this week was “Nomadland,” which stars Frances McDormand as a widow in the Great Recession-era American West, who takes to her van and then to the road after losing job and home, falling in with a community of similar four-wheel vagabonds.
According to both media prognosticators and Vegas oddsmakers, “Nomadland” is currently considered the “Best Picture” favorite for April’s Academy Awards. Perhaps this is a function of a year in which higher-wattage contenders ducked a pandemic box-office drought. Or maybe it would have been in a similar place regardless. After all, the South Korean thriller/social satire “Parasite” was the Best Picture winner last year. Perhaps what would once have been considered unconventional at the Academy is no longer?
But there is one place “Nomadland” will be this week that it almost certainly wouldn’t in a “normal” movie year: On one of the biggest screens in town, opening and playing exclusively on the IMAX screen at Malco’s Paradiso Cinema Grill.
If “Nomadland” does maintain its position as Oscar favorite, it would make a more-than-worthy winner. It’s also the best new film I’ve seen in the past year.
It was a risk to put name performers alongside non-actors for this journalistic portrait of a real-world subculture, but in David Strathairn and particularly lead McDormand (also a producer), writer-director Chloe Zhao has actors with the gruffness and humility to pull it off.
McDormand’s Fern begins as a kind of emblem and evolves into a figure whose mysteries are more personal. Along the way, Zhao juxtaposes the timeless and the timely landscapes of the West against the kind of work options afforded today’s gig workers amid the country’s open spaces: Amazon fulfillment centers, industrial farms, tourist traps.
It’s a personal story tracking one woman, but it’s also a kind of travelogue that will not seem out of place or unworthy on the giant screen.
The film’s final image of Fern is the latest and perhaps most purposeful among the countless homages to John Ford’s final shot in “The Searchers,” this one a kind of inversion on the theme of the relationship between individual, community and landscape. Alternate title for a new “Western” classic: “The Searcher.”
New releases and revivals: “Nomadland” has competition for biggest movie opening in Memphis this week. The other is Malco’s Studio on the Square, which will join the handful of other Memphis Malco theaters that have reopened over the past couple of weeks.
Studio will show “Wonder Woman 1984,” the Denzel Washington thriller “The Little Things,” the Liam Neeson thriller “The Marksman,” and another awards-season notable, the provocative drama “Promising Young Woman.” The Studio slate also includes one new title: the romantic drama “Little Fish.”
The only new release opening wide in Memphis this week is the horror film “The Reckoning,” from director Neil Marshall. For what it’s worth, Marshall’s 2005 film “The Descent” is probably one of the current century’s best horror films. Opening at Hollywood Cinema is “Son of the South,” a civil-rights-era historical drama that includes Memphis native Lucy Hale in its cast.
The holiday-appropriate 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day,” which earns its “modern classic” reputation, continues at multiple locations.
Indie Memphis, coming off a successful run as a Sundance Film Festival satellite location, continues its various “virtual cinema” offerings, including the Memphis-connected documentary from director Lynne Sachs, “Film About a Father Who”; the historical documentary “Coup 53,” about the 1953 coup in Iran; and “Property,” a 1979 feature about a group of neighbors at odds with real estate developers.
Coming attractions: You’ll still have to wait a month to see the finished product, but a full trailer debuted this week for “Coming 2 America” the sequel to the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy blockbuster “Coming to America.”
Once planned for a theatrical debut this past Christmas, “Coming 2 America” is streaming via Amazon Prime on March 5. This sequel, as you probably know, was directed by Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer, who shot the film in Atlanta and was recently finalizing post-production work from his Memphis office at Crosstown Concourse.
Another Memphis-related work coming to streaming services, even sooner, is “Buried by the Bernards,” a reality series about a Memphis funeral home that’s debuting on Netflix on Feb. 12. The trailer:
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Malco Paradiso Studio on the Square Indie Memphis Sundance Film Festival Coming 2 America Craig Brewer Buried by the BernardsChris Herrington on demand
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Chris Herrington
Chris Herrington has covered the Memphis Grizzlies, in one way or another, since the franchise’s second season in Memphis, while also writing about music, movies, food and civic life. As far as he knows, he’s the only member of the Professional Basketball Writers Association who is also a member of a film critics group and has also voted in national music critic polls for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice (RIP). He and his wife have two kids and, for reasons that sometimes elude him, three dogs.
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