Brooklyn

John Crowley's Brooklyn opened in 2015 and won the BAFTA for Best British Film, with three Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Actress (Saoirse Ronan) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nick Hornby, adapting Colm Tóibín's 2009 novel). Ronan, then twenty-one, was Oscar-nominated for the second time; the role permanently shifted her trajectory from precocious child performer to leading-actress career.

Eilis Lacey (Ronan, in one of the most quietly observed central performances of the 2010s) is a young Irish shop-girl from County Wexford who emigrates to Brooklyn in 1951 with the support of an Irish-American priest. The first half of the film is her slow integration into the New York Italian-Irish-American world — a boarding house, a department-store job, evening accountancy classes, a tentative romance with the Italian-American Tony (Emory Cohen). Then a family tragedy summons her back to Ireland, and the film's second half stages an impossible decision between two equally credible futures.

The film operates simultaneously as immigration drama, period romance, and meditation on the geographical-emotional cost of leaving. Yves Bélanger's photography of 1950s Brooklyn and Wexford is unobtrusively beautiful; Hornby's screenplay condenses Tóibín's novel into one of the more disciplined recent adaptations. Ronan's performance — withholding, observant, finally clear-eyed — is widely cited as the moment she became the actress she would later be in Lady Bird, Little Women, and The Outrun.