For Fans of Saoirse Ronan

That is a large claim, and it holds. John Crowley and Nick Hornby's adaptation of Colm Toibin's novel works because Ronan never lets Eilis Lacey be passive. She is homesick, she is lonely, she is quietly competent, and she is choosing, the whole time, which life she will allow herself. The film treats the interior work of emigration, the grief, the guilt, the slow reconstitution of a self, with a seriousness that most prestige pictures avoid. It earns every tear it eventually collects.

Greta Gerwig gave Ronan a character who is wrong about almost everything and completely right about how it feels to be seventeen and furious and certain you belong somewhere else. The film's genius is that Sacramento is beautiful, and the film knows it even when Lady Bird doesn't. Ronan holds that dramatic irony entirely in her body. The ending, a single phone call, is five of the best minutes in American cinema this century.

Between Atonement, Brooklyn, Little Women, On Chesil Beach, and Eileen, Ronan has starred in five serious literary adaptations in fifteen years. Each one succeeds not because the source is faithful but because she embodies the specific quality the source demands: McEwan's retrospective anguish, Toibin's restrained yearning, Alcott's stubborn hope, McEwan again for repression, and Ottessa Moshfegh's cold alienation. She is, at this point, the most reliable literary adapter working in English-language film.