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Critics reviews

THE IMMIGRANT

James Gray United States, 2013
While Bruno does hold great sway over Ewa's story, the film's focus is her struggle to bear the burden of achieving the American dream. Her story, then, fills a historically overlooked female perspective on labour in film, one where work doesn't take the form of the more cinematically celebrated narratives of macho American work life, like the mafia (The Godfather and The Godfather II) or crime rings (Gangs of New York). It's the one that no one wants to talk about: sex.
August 21, 2014
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Screen Machine
There is the potential for a dangerous religious obscurantism here that favors an ethereal salvation over the material realities of their situation. But Gray's sentimental melodrama is foremost a humanist film that privileges the individual experience—their feelings and desires—over favoring the system itself, which often runs the risk of depicting the characters as the helpless victims of a tragic history.
July 21, 2014
If everything is movement, if everything is formal, so Gray's camera is no longer a camera-stylo and is now a camera-microscope or a camera-bucksaw, because it whittles and analyses frontally the situations and emotions. Henceforth, if we are seeing a film about someone who is going farther and is crying to reach her destiny to the will of destiny, what is left to us is being complacent to the sanctity of the woman who walks.
July 9, 2014
The Immigrant is often dazzling in its sweep and depth, able to articulate peeling, ramshackle 1920s interiors of the newly-arrived with the still fresh heroism of architectural modernism. Even the sterile symmetry of government hallways bears a Kafkaesque gleam, impressive after a fashion. At the same time, these visual motifs frequently feel brittle and textualized in a manner that I haven't encountered before with Gray's cinema.
May 31, 2014
The Immigrant is a simple story, told clearly and directly, building to an emotional climax of dumbfounding, immobilizing power, which hinges on two confessions, one from Ewa, the other from Bruno. ("If you could lick my heart, you'd taste nothing but poison," says Bruno, his words echoing a line from one of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.)
May 23, 2014
All three [main] characters undergo profound transformations; as they evolve, so too does the film, moving from sweeping social drama to a portrait of spiritual epiphany. Beautifully shot (by Darius Khondji), designed, and performed, this may well be Gray's masterpiece.
May 21, 2014
[Ewa's] defining moment comes when she revisits her aunt and asks a penitent "Is it a sin to try to survive?" Then she modifies the question, asking "Is it a sin to _want_ to survive after doing so many bad things?" The former is self-martyrdom, the latter a defiant refusal of same... It hardly comes as a surprise that this is the director's best film yet. Surely, that places it among the upper-echelon of contemporary American film.
May 16, 2014
If we can accept it on its own terms, "The Immigrant" has many moments of exceptional power and rare delicacy, none more potent than the final shot, which achieves a haunting visual balance between the characters of Ewa and Bruno that cannot be achieved for them in their interactions with each other but can be achieved through the talent and skill of the man who is behind the camera guiding and shaping and watching them.
May 16, 2014
The Immigrant," for all its meticulous detail and dramatic nuance, turns naturalism inside out. Gray proves—as he has always proved—that what matters isn't frames and cuts, story lines and character traits, but the melodies and harmonies, the moods and tones that arise from them, and that, in turn, seem to deflect, distort, shudder, and shatter them.
May 16, 2014
What makes The Immigrant a great film is the way in which Gray uses actors and his mastery of the unspoken to create a tremendously lived-in, felt-through world. Every space—public or private, interior or exterior—feels authentic, historically and emotionally... In terms of texture, The Immigrant is a great film; emotionally, it's a masterpiece.
May 15, 2014
...The Immigrant is the rare period piece that never seems embalmed. The film's vitality emerges from its intimate observations—like Ewa's first experience eating a banana—many of which were informed by the memories of the director's own grandparents, Russian émigrés who arrived at Ellis Island in 1923. But the beating heart of the movie is Cotillard, whose saucer eyes recall those of imperiled silent-screen legends like Lillian Gish.
May 14, 2014
The Immigrant is a bleak story, and Gray favors a narrative classicism that seems out of vogue—at least as far as current American cinema goes—in its slow-build patience and delicacy. You may often find yourself second-guessing the film, questioning how—and if—it will all come together. But by the time of the intense and impassioned climax, a storm of emotion is ensured: a great movie rising before you like a delusion, like a dream.
May 13, 2014