Nomadland

Photograph courtesy of IMDb

Describing two of his favorite novels, Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) said “Moby-Dick is about space and On the Road is about speed.” Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and screened as the centerpiece of this year’s New York Film Festival, is a film about both of those things: the wide open spaces of the American landscape, and the speed at which Fern (Frances McDormand) passes through them in a year-long cycle, pulling up to various small…