Brooklyn

John Crowley's Brooklyn opened in 2015 and won the BAFTA for Best British Film, along with three Academy Award nominations: 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, and the role moved her for good from precocious child performer to leading actress.

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

It works as an immigration drama and as a period romance, but its real subject is what leaving costs, in miles and in feeling. Yves Bélanger's photography of 1950s Brooklyn and Wexford is unobtrusively beautiful, and Hornby's screenplay condenses Tóibín's novel with a discipline few recent adaptations manage. Ronan's performance, withholding and observant and finally clear-eyed, is where she became the actress of Lady Bird, Little Women and The Outrun.