Nomadland (M18)

108 minutes/opens March 18

3 stars

Every now and then, Singapore forums explode with arguments about the working elderly, the aunties and uncles who scavenge cardboard or clean hawker centres despite being well into their 60s and 70s.

The fights hinge on the question of free will. Do these retirees choose to work, or is the gun of poverty held to their heads? This movie suggests that for a large number of the working elderly, the answer is "a bit of both". Mostly, the film explores the subculture of those who make lemonade from the lemons of being older, broke and in need of an income.

Beijing-born, United States-based film-maker Chloe Zhao excels at selling the notion that the life of a modern-day vagabond is not only practical but urgent and necessary. Through the eyes of Fern, a widow of steely intentions played by the wonderfully expressive Frances McDormand, the audience takes a tour of an America of glorious sunsets and awe-inspiring natural vistas, while in the company of a tribe whose members care for one another.

This movie is boiling over with awards heat at the moment. It has a Best Picture (Drama) and Best Director Golden Globe and just received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (for Zhao), Best Actress (McDormand) and Best Adapted Screenplay, among others.

Award voters love films with a cause and this movie's optimistic and uplifting portrayal of a troupe of working-class heroes certainly qualifies. While a streak of melancholy runs throughout, older people are shown embracing an economy with not much to offer other than seasonal, low-paid work from the likes of Amazon. But with enough old-fashioned gumption and training in fixing flat tyres or how to go to the toilet in pails, Fern and her band of roving sun-chasers get by.

Its sunny take is a departure from the pessimism of the source material, the 2017 non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America In The Twenty-First Century. Journalist Jessica Bruder describes a world of transients struggling with the brutal options left to them following the 2008 financial crash.

Zhao clearly loves her characters - the majority of whom are played by real nomads - but that affection leads her to romanticise what feels like genuine economic suffering.

So after Nomadland, consider following up with a clear-eyed movie about the gig economy and how it is akin to modern-day slavery. Firebrand film-maker Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You, an evisceration of the contract worker industry created by companies like Amazon is still available to rent online on anticipatepictures.com.

Promising young woman (NC16)

114 minutes, opens March 18

4 stars

Like Nomadland, this movie's release has been timed for the Oscar nomination announcements. The distributor's bet has paid off: British writer-director Emerald Fennell will enter Oscar season with nods in the categories of Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, among others.

This might lead you to think this is a slow-burn arthouse project. No. This is a gripping, often blackly humorous revenge thriller, lightly laced with horror.

Promising Young Woman would be a well-made, highly enjoyable film in any year, but it shares the Oscar-bait characteristics of the horror works Get Out (2017) and Us (2019): a ripped-from-the-headlines, socially relevant theme and a protagonist who embodies the darker desires of an oppressed group.

Cassie (Carey Mulligan) spends her nights getting drunk in bars and clubs. Men offer to take care of her, but to her disappointment - and icy rage - they want something other than to send her home safely.

Fennell's background in comedy, which includes writing for and producing the espionage thriller Killing Eve (2018 to present) gives Cassie's adventures in the land of toxic masculinity a lightness that would feel inappropriate and silly if not handled well. She makes Cassie's pain and hunger for redress visceral without plunging the movie into unrelenting grimness or M18-rated gore.

It is a lot harder to do than it appears and Fennell, working through Mulligan, achieves the near impossible.

Counterattack (NC16)

88 minutes/opens March 18/not reviewed

This Chinese action thriller stars Vincent Zhao - who also directs - as Lu Ziming, a security expert with a dark past that catches up with him after he takes on a high-profile job guarding a gas plant.