Brooklyn is a film that elegantly tip-toes the fine line of being a generic Notebook or a generic Titanic or simply a generic period love story. Fortunately, it's a far more nuanced and emotionally complex film than Titanic or The Notebook could ever be. Thanks to an unforgettable performance from Saoirse Ronan, as well as a career-making performance from Emory Cohen, Brooklyn is quite possibly the best cinematic (heterosexual) love story of 2015.

I'll get the obvious out of the way first, shall I? Saoirse Ronan. Easy on the eyes, talented, the real deal. There's no surprise that suitors basically trip over each other in the film - just look at the way Emory Cohen and Domnhall Gleeson's characters look at her. She commands the frame as she portrays the evolution of a shy and scared girl to a young woman taking control of her life. This is the performance that will finally make Saoirse Ronan a (unpronounceable) household name. An indicator of good acting is when the audience is on the character's side even after just a few moments, without anything in particular happening. An easy way to explain it is through Blake Snyder's * Save the Cat! * concept: in screenwriting, when the protagonist is introduced, they should do something nice, e.g., saving a cat, which makes the audience like the protagonist and sympathise with them. You know what this film's "Save The Cat" moment is? Saoirse Ronan's face. The nuance in her performance is stunning as it progresses so naturally through the film, that by the end, you don't even realise just how different she is behaving than at the start.

Let's also talk feminism: Suffragette was the obvious go-to feminist film of 2015, but I think Brooklyn is far more... relevant on a personal level to most people. Whereas Suffragette was a melodramatic and obvious if not important history lesson, Brooklyn takes themes of homesickness, nostalgia and love centred around a young woman's inner and outer journey to create one of the "strongest" female characters of the year. Not everyone can understand persecution and degradation due to one's sex, but everyone at least knows one of those emotions. There's a subtlety and nuance beneath the surface which is as simple as creating a character everyone can relate to regardless of sex, yet also remarkably complex in executing it correctly. Two men revolve around her life, and yet that is the most important part: they revolve around her, rather than her fainting and chasing after two men.

Brooklyn also deals with the very real emotional journey immigrants went, and still go through. The period detail to the close-knit communities of Irish and Italian living in Brooklyn gave a real and well-researched feel to the main character's physical location. Of course, Saoirse encapsulates the complex and deep-running emotions of her character to perfection. Have I mentioned that she is incredible?

Of course the film's success isn't solely because of Saoirse Ronan's performance, far from it - the success of this film is the clear unification of writing, editing, directing and acting all working in conjunction with each other (not to mention casting and production design). The editing in particular is economic, with only a couple of well-timed cuts to close-up for effect, remaining in a personal medium shot or medium close-up throughout the film. Thank goodness for the Arri Alexa and prime lenses, as they helped enhance the production design to look particularly of it's time.

It's about time we had a good period piece, and Brooklyn exceeded all my expectations. It's tender at the same time as portraying the raw realities of leaving home in a time where EasyJet didn't exist. It's seems to be about a love triangle, but in fact it's about a young woman's journey into adulthood - played to perfection by... Saoirse Ronan.