I think if you told someone that Saoirse Ronan (The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Lovely Bones), the actress who won audiences over with her innocent portrayal of a conflicted young Irish immigrant navigating her way through 1950s New York City in 2015’s fabulous Brooklyn (which earned her a Best Actress Nomination) is the same person playing the lead role two years later in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, they’d look at you funny before looking at pictures of her from both movies, recalling scenes from each, and then of nodding their heads and saying, “Yeah, I guess that is the same actress.” While a movie I didn’t really resonate with and definitely near the bottom of the Best Picture nominees in the lackluster 2017, I did appreciate her performance…one that was just as honest and true as the one she gave in Brooklyn. And similarly to 2015, her work in this movie is likely the third or fourth-best of the year and landed Ronan her second Academy Award nomination.
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