Film publicity is rarely subtle, so don't see Brooklyn if you are looking for the love-triangle tearjerker that its release poster promises. A film with its source in the spare, luminous writing of Colm Tóibín – as perceptive about women as any man writing – is never going to be standard Hollywood fare. Brooklyn benefits also from thoughtful direction by Irishman John Crowley (whose credits include an MA in philosophy) and an intelligent script – alive with Irish craic and nuance – by novelist Nick Hornby. Hornby is at home in both literary and cinematic modes, and frank about the commercial and artistic imperatives of film. 'Tóibín leaves a lot to the imagination', he notes in a Rolling Stone interview (4 November 2015), 'which you can't afford to do in film ... because the characters are standing right there. You have to commit in some way.'

So if the film has limitations, and it does, they lie in that conundrum of commercial cinema – its having 'to commit', rather than let the viewer linger, as a reader can, in uncertainty, or perhaps in wonder, at the tensions, the heart wrenches and ambiguities of ordinary lives.