The Immigrant (2013)
Directed by James Gray
1921 New York. An immigrant woman is tricked into a life of burlesque and vaudeville until a dazzling magician tries to save her and reunite her with her sister who is being held in the confines of Ellis Island.
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What critics compared The Immigrant to
In America, an influx of migration (predominantly from Europe, both pre- and post-war) has inspired countless films such as America, America (1963), The Godfather Part II (1974), Hester Street (1975), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Golden Door (2006), and the appropriately-titled The Immigrant (2013) with Marion Cotillard.
From The Godfather: Part II (1974) to The Immigrant (2013), when it comes to immigrants, Hollywood has long been interested in the workings of the underworld—the glamour and gore of the mafia, the plight of the prostitute, the ties that bind those of a common ancestry.
If you’ve seen any recent movies about the immigrant experience of those who came to America anytime in the early to mid-20th Century, whether it’s The Golden Door, James Gray’s The Immigrant or even a movie like Titanic, you’re likely to watch this new movie from author/screenwriter Nick Hornby and Irish stage director John Crowley (Intermission) expecting its protagonist to be in for a terrible experience.
Brooklyn could be seen as a sunnier, shallower variation on James Gray’s more harshly realistic (and brilliant) The Immigrant , or even a sweeter version of Tóibin’s more pungent novel—but that unfairly undervalues what Crowley, Hornby, and Ronan are doing.
Like a sunnier counterpart to 2013's beautiful yet painful The Immigrant, which had Marion Cotillard as a Polish émigré forced to make ends meet as a prostitute in 1920s New York, Brooklyn presents a colorful, confident portrait of the American Dream, with Ronan's levelheaded protagonist serving as a walking beacon of hope and optimism.
Some will discount Crowley’s film as a saccharine variation on James Gray ’s “The Immigrant” but that would sell this film short.
The last movie he set in New York was his 2013 period drama, “The Immigrant,” whose story finds a resonant echo here when Paul’s grandfather reminisces about the family’s own passage through Ellis Island.
This is what Gray (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z, The Immigrant) does with Armageddon Time, a clear-eyed coming-of-age drama that is surprisingly muted compared to the artistic flourishes—particularly in mise en scene and camerawork—of his previous films.
(At first, his critical support came mostly from France.) Starting with Two Lovers , his films abandoned their genre elements — The Immigrant and The Lost City of Z turned to the past.
The Russian-Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach served as a forlorn and culturally complex backdrop to Two Lovers, the romantic drama he made next, while The Immigrant cast its gaze back through time and memory to evoke New York in the early 1920s, mythologizing it in smoke and gold while rendering the emotional lives of characters in thrall to its expanse with a fraught and fiercely intimate melodicism.
As a director, James Gray has lately been a filmmaker of grand gestures, whether with period pieces like the lush “The Immigrant” to 2019’s sci-fi opus “Ad Astra” starring Brad Pitt.
Little Odessa (1994) was set in Brighton Beach; The Yards in the Bronx; The Immigrant took us to Ellis Island.
Even more than James Gray’s The Immigrant—whose 1920s setting, immigrant-experience narrative, and sumptuously nostalgic cinematography recall The Godfather Part II—J.C. Chandor’s latest film is, in terms of form and content, deeply indebted to the tale of the Corleone clan.
Gray's "Godfather II" inspired " The Immigrant " is also excellent, and likewise steeped in post-Vietnam America's cinema traditions, although it's gentler, told from a female perspective, and set more deeply in the past.
While the likes of Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese have staked their claim on the town, it may not be too surprising to see Margin Call’s J.C. Chandor exploring the New York immigrant experience in a contrasting way to James Gray’s recent The Immigrant.
In this, the contemporary American filmmaker that he most resembles is his relative elder James Gray, who also made a Manhattan melodrama this year with The Immigrant, which reached even further back into the city’s past.
Even those masterworks, mind you, couldn’t clearly set the stage for Two Lovers and The Immigrant, two of the most alluring and near-confessional American films of this or any other decade.
But upon closer inspection of its more refined tenor, the picture appears as a continuation of the quieter mood found in his previous melodrama, “The Immigrant,” and his winning collaboration with that film’s same cinematographer, Darius Khonji.
I can and will compliment the movie for a number of reasons not necessarily pertaining to what material it was printed on and what machine it came out of, so let it be stated upfront that this is most likely the best (only?) way to experience what Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji, reuniting from The Immigrant, have achieved: a film that will often truly and totally appear to have been made in decades past and just discovered today.
Adapted from David Grann’s 2009 book of the same name, The Lost City of Z sees the welcome return of director James Gray (The Immigrant) in a highly ambitious undertaking.
It was not until “The Immigrant” (2013) that Gray spread his wings and took flight.
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He based the look of The Yards (2000) on the work of French realist painters, drew on the narrative structure of Dostoevsky's White Nights for Two Lovers (2009), and took inspiration from Puccini's operas for The Immigrant (2013).
James Gray, the director and co-writer of “Ad Astra,” is the furthest thing you could imagine from a space dude; he’s a rigorous indie filmmaker known for such fine-grained fare as “The Lost City of Z,” “The Immigrant” and (my favorite Gray film) “Two Lovers.”
In this science fiction film from director and cowriter James Gray ( The Lost City of Z , The Immigrant ) Pitt plays Major Roy McBride a near-future soldier-scientist whose father, a legendary astronaut named H.
James Gray, who directed, is a real talent (“The Immigrant,” “The Lost City of Z”).
James Gray is a cerebral and immensely creative director who has already made a batch of morally challenging films such as The Immigrant , The Lost City of Z ).
Landing on strange shores is one element Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow and James Gray’s The Immigrant share, and at first glance that might seem the end of it.