Very well executed

Fantastic!

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Director James Gray returns in his 2013 production of The Immigrant to one of his recurrent themes - the one that made him known in the first long feature film he made Little Odessa - immigration, and to his preferred background which features also in his debut but also in the more recent Two Lovers - New York. Actually his other well known feature film We Own the Night was not located too remotely as well. In all his last film we also enjoy the presence of Joaquin Phoenix, an actor that I highly appreciate. We can already speak about a cluster of works happening more or less in the same milieu, with a team of actors and a style of story telling that make it consistent. Not necessarily successful - to my taste at least.This story of two sisters arriving in New York in the 1920s, and their fight to remain in the New Promised Land and survive by all means could have been made in 1930, or 1960, or 1990. It would have looked a little different as technical means differ, but otherwise not too much seems to have changed. The 2013 version adds too little from an emotional point of view to really make a true emotional or social impact. Neither does the passionate and tragic love story between the pimp and the new innocent immigrant look too true. It starts as a story of mutual destruction, it continues as a tragic love triangle, it ends by destroying the charmer and the harmer in a too much expected way.If there is one actress who can play wonderfully melodrama today on screens, this is Marion Cotillard. She does exactly what is expected, and so does Joaquin Phoenix. This is not enough. Director James Gray knows how to tell a story on screen, but his style must overcome the clichés in order to free the good director we guess he is. Chaplin's film with the same name made almost 100 years ago still remains a stake of value hard to exceed.

There is nothing new or surprising in the story: a poor young immigrant girl who is fresh-off-the-boat taken advantage of, and is sexually exploited by another survivor (just one step above in the food chain ladder) in the golden age of immigration in America.The acting is good, but the script is quite poor and the direction merely goes through the motions of formal correctness without adding depth, or a true reflection, or a new insight on the matter.The characters lack in complexity and reality; the revealing of social injustice is more a "homework making" of a formal outrage than a truly insightful exploration of human miseries.It is an average film with minor hits and major misses which, in my opinion, will not make its way through history, even for easy-to-please audiences as the lovers of Hollywood movies.

James Gray co-wrote (with Richard Menello who had worked with Gray on his other films and who died in 2013) and directed this slow moving but insightful film about the immigration topic that swirls through the media at the present time. His previous films – 'Little Odessa', 'We Own the Night, 'The Yards' and 'Two Lovers' are similar in feeling – dark, many repeated actors, coloration of the film product. But THE IMMIGRANT reflects the history of us all – all of us in the USA being immigrants in our lives or our histories – and as such it is very much like being given access to a personal scrapbook of survival in a new land.The film opens in 1921 on Ellis Island. In search of a new start and the American dream, Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard, superb!) and her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) sail to New York from their native Poland. When they reach Ellis Island, doctors discover that Magda is ill with tuberculosis, and the two women are separated. Ewa is released onto the mean streets of Manhattan while her sister is quarantined. Alone, with nowhere to turn and desperate to reunite with Magda, she quickly falls prey to Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), a charming but wicked man who takes her in and forces her into prostitution. And then one day, Ewa encounters Bruno's cousin, the debonair magician Orlando (Jeremy Renner). He sweeps Ewa off her feet and quickly becomes her only chance to escape the nightmare in which she finds herself. Bruno owns a men's club run by Belva (Dagmara Dominczyk) in which the girl's Bruno has 'saved' perform burlesque for the drinking men. In many ways Bruno is a caring a kind man but has a manic streak that colors the loves of everyone around him. He is the epitome of the immigrants who took (take?) advantage of frighten and desperate immigrants for money and power.The film is very slow, sort of a one-note song, but the acting is excellent and the cinematography by Darius Khondi captures the claustrophobic effect of living in secrecy and in less than suitable conditions. Though the film drags on a bit too long it does bring to our attention the trials of entering this country as an immigrant.

I was eager to see The Immigrant, curious about how the filmmakers would handle the Polishness of the lead character, Ewa Cybulska (played by the wonderful French actress Marion Cotillard). Would there be any Polish spoken? Would Cotillard handle her role as well as Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice? Although the film is sometimes a little too pat, a little too Hollywood, I needn't have worried about the authenticity of the characters, and the film handles the unsavory aspects of the lives of immigrants in 1921 New York with discretion. What surprised me most about the film is the way it tackled the centuries old tension between ethnic Poles and Polish Jews. Ewa is a naive arrival from Poland to Ellis Island, where she and her sister are detained because the sister has tuberculosis and must be deported. One always suspects that this checking was deliberately done on the other side of the ocean, after passage had been paid. Be that as it may, devoted to her sister and her Catholic religion, Ewa soon falls victim to a scheme that involves payoffs and bribes and falling into the clutches of a volatile Jewish schemer, Bruno Weiss, who promises to bankroll the sister's freedom. Desperate and alone, Ewa sees no other choice but to play along and put a price tag on her body in scenes that are sometimes more comical than lurid. Played by Joaquin Phoenix with all the tension and weirdness we've come to expect from this strange actor, her pimp falls in love with her-- as does a magician in Weiss's sleazy burlesque show. Ewa's volatile relationship with the two men--her conflicted pimp and his romantic cousin--leads to a surprising conclusion. This is very much a Hollywood film but very much worth seeing.