Critics reviews

Everything in Crowley's movie hangs on Saoirse Ronan's performance as Eilis. Again and again the director and his cinematographer Yves Bélanger return to close-ups of Ronan, and she's as clear as rainwater; the smallest emotions move across her face and are plainly legible. Brooklyn at heart is a women's picture, that staple of mid-century cinema in which a woman must choose her path in life, and the film adapts the genre's traditions splendidly.

Saoirse Ronan carries each luminous frame of John Crowley's sublime immigrant romance, her every downward glance and tentative smile teasing out a complete dramatic arc with the sort of delicacy rarely entrusted to an audience anymore. You don't just follow a young Irishwoman across the Atlantic in this movie; you are ushered into a world of pure, unforced feeling, where the difficulties of settling down in a foreign land reveal every moment of humor, kindness and beauty for the gift that it is.

The music was a real problem, and was trying to make the film something it wasn't. Like you, what I warmed to in Brooklyn, alongside the nostalgic depictions of the borough, was the fact that it didn't take any of the melodramatic paths that the initial setting provided for it. There was no logic of inexorable suffering and cruelty, and no Manichaean division between good and evil characters, victims and villains. [Virtually] everyone in the film was essentially good-natured, albeit flawed.

I felt a strong force at work in in this movie. It did not ask for the audience to submit before feelings that were larger-than-life but just the opposite. It asked for the audience to open themselves so that their own life stories can be given grace... The music is really my only regret with the film. I was reminded of Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005), another adaptation of literary prose, where the silence of the original work is given a kind of superadded tearjerker special sauce.

The movie reads the promise and heartbreak of America on Ronan's open face; if you make it through her parting gesture to another homesick newcomer without wiping your eyes on your armrest, you're made of sterner stuff than I.

Given its plot outline – girl struggles to choose between two attractive men and two ways of life – Brooklyn might seem to be verging on Nicholas Sparks or even Mills & Boon territory. That it transcends any such romantic slush puddles is partly thanks to the uniformly excellent casting, but essentially to Hornby and Crowley's fidelity to the spirit of their emotionally complex source material.

It's a story to savor in the mere telling... That's why the sense of cinematic emptiness and narrative reduction that "Brooklyn" conveys, the nearly ridiculously blanked-out botch of a movie that results, is all the more disappointing. Despite the formidable artistry exerted by its actors on its realization, "Brooklyn" isn't so much a bad movie as it is a virtual self-parody of a genre—that of the minor, dignified, clean-hands art-house preciosity.

Some day soon after a brisk run in theaters and, with luck, a clutch of well-deserved Oscars, Brooklyn may find its sweet hereafter as a Turner Classic Movies selection of the month on endless repeat. I mean this as the highest compliment: Though it's set in 1950s coastal Ireland and New York, from soup to nuts Brooklyn comes as close as any contemporary drama I can think of (other than Todd Haynes' breathily semiotic Far From Heaven) to the finest women's movies of the 1930s and 1940s.

Brooklyn is a very nice movie... [It's] a tale of cultural displacement so sanitized and swooningly romantic that film buffs could recommend it to their parents and grandparents without hesitation. All of that may sound like a slam, but it's not meant to be. It's not easy to make a movie as beautiful as Brooklyn, where the stakes are low but the outcome really matters. This is an old-fashioned entertainment, but one so masterfully crafted and heartfelt that it's hard not to love.

This calm, spellbinding movie is the rare literary adaptation that rewards a book's fans with unexpected insights while taking on a vibrant life of its own. Make that two lives, or even three... Crowley's plangent images, Hornby's nimble dialogue, Ronan's uncanny ability to suggest inchoate feelings—together they convey Eilis's shocks and sensations as she adapts to Eisenhower-era Brooklyn.

Ronan absolutely nails the steely sense of self-preservation which makes Eilis certain she has to go, yet her effortlessly layered performance wraps it inside the unaffected homeyness of a sheltered country girl who'll desperately miss her mum and sister when she leaves. That undertow of sadness, perhaps even guilt at being selfish enough to make the big move, keeps the rest of the movie emotionally grounded, as Ronan convinces us she's growing up before our very eyes.

If I may be utterly, unabashedly frank, I admit that the first time I saw this picture I started crying about forty minutes in and never really stopped. They were not all sad tears, I hasten to add. The persistent feeling that this movie so beautifully creates is that even when the world is bestowing blessings upon us, it's still at the bottom a sad place, and the key to an emotionally healthy existence involves some rooted acceptance of that.