Chloé Zhao

In The Rider, a young rodeo star is told that the horse which crushed his skull has ended his riding, and he goes looking for some other way to be a man in South Dakota. Zhao casts non-professionals close to their own lives and shoots them at dusk in country that makes them small. Nomadland has a woman in her sixties lose everything in the Great Recession and move into a van; Songs My Brothers Taught Me stays on the Pine Ridge reservation with a brother and sister working out what home is. Then there is Eternals, a Marvel film about immortal aliens, which nothing else here predicts. Nobody offers a lesson. You keep company with these people until the light goes.

Signature

• Non-professional casts drawing on their own lives.
• Wide landscape at dusk, the frame dwarfing the person in it.
• Documentary texture inside a fiction structure.
• Endings that decline catharsis and simply carry on.

Distinguish from Shares Survival with disaster and thriller films, but there is no antagonist and no climax — the pressure is economic and ambient. Register is arthouse, never sentimental melodrama, despite subject matter that invites it.