Where The Crawdads Sing (2022)

In this D-grade To Kill A Mockingbird that takes Harper Lee's Southern Gothicism and replaces it with Hallmark schmaltz, a patently absurd Boo Radley archetype — a "Marsh Girl" ostracized by townsfolk despite being polite, independent, self-sufficient, strong, well-groomed, self-educated, and someone who easily attracts a spunky local boyfriend not once but twice, and who sets herself up as a mussel-monger and later as a book illustrator by communicating winningly with local shop owners and uppity city book publishers — is made a cause célèbre when she contrives a way to have her abusive boyfriend drop sixty-five feet from a firetower.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Nomadland (2020)

The underpaid and overworked man I'm friendly with in my supermarket didn't recognise the name of this movie when I told him it was the reason why I was passing through on the way home so much later than usual, so I told him, "A woman lives in a van and drives around America," and joked that that was everything, he didn't need to see it, he knew everything, but of course there is so much more to Nomadland than that: it is a poem, really, full of breathtaking moments, about the humans who out of necessity pare life down to its most simple form and push, drive on, and somehow manage to still find great beauty in things - say, broken eggshells - even when all else around them is broken.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS