Loved it

The Immigrant is the best American film I've seen in about four years, a triumph for Gray, who until now has frequently flirted with greatness without actually consummating it. Many of his defendants like to call him novelistic. I've always considered that compliment pejorative. Most "novelistic" films are dull and overly script reliant, just as most "painterly" shots ("Every still could be framed and put on the wall!") are garish and lifeless. The Immigrant is cinematic, as much so as a film byVon Sternberg or Wong, two notable antecedents of Gray's increasingly complex visual style. Drawn on an enormous canvas, both in terms of production and the world it resurrects, it is nonetheless content to slowly narrow its focus to only a few small details (an apartment, a song, a few gestures of love or viciousness) until it rediscovers everything else mirrored in them. It is a traumatizing film, one that dwells on and in emotions that are unreconcilable, that, though powerful, refuse to make the world a simpler place. Marion Cotillard's performance is a wonder, a thing of delicacy and subtlety , even in moments of vertiginous drama, and Phoenix has never been better, thanks in part to a director willing for once to allow him to act, rather than simply content to wallow in the timbre of his voice and the irregularity of his features. It is not a perfect film, with one puzzling misstep (the dream sequence) and several moments of narrative crudeness that beg the question of Weinstein meddling. Neither of these things are enough to discredit all the good it does. That it has been ignored in favor of so many far inferior films that it shares a certain amount of pedigree with is hopefully only a cruel quirk of fate, though in all likelihood a more sinister omen.