Critics reviews

Branagh’s script is rife with wry humour. Full to the brim with reverence and love for his characters, the performances he elicits are uniformly excellent.

There is a terrific warmth and tenderness to Kenneth Branagh’s elegiac, autobiographical movie about the Belfast of his childhood: spryly written, beautifully acted and shot in a lustrous monochrome, with set pieces, madeleines and epiphanies that feel like a more emollient version of Terence Davies... Love letters to the past are always addressed to an illusion, yet this is such a seductive piece of myth-making from Branagh.

[Kenneth Branagh] has made a masterpiece. It’s a film of formal beauty, letter-perfect performances, complex and textured writing (also from Branagh) and enough comedic one-liners and Van Morrison musical montages to make you forget that you’re watching a drama about seething sectarian hatreds.

["Belfast"] works gorgeously as an idealised memory play... Given the lightweight nature of the drama, Branagh was perhaps wise to engage only obliquely with the politics.

Branagh tends to plump for dramatic compositions that look arresting but feel like the opposite of a kid’s-eye-view. The politics, meanwhile, are far more childlike, with the conflict portrayed as religious rather than nationalistic in nature, and no opinion ventured beyond “divisions are bad”... Belfast’s flights of nostalgia can feel oddly impersonal.

[Kenneth Branagh's] most intimate and deeply felt film to date... Branagh’s memory piece is unabashedly sentimental but undeniably powerful. It might just prove to be his defining work.

From a formal stance, there’s not much here to blow one away, but the film’s heartfelt sentiments and polished production should have no trouble appealing to the general audience... Belfast is ravishing (shout-out to cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos) and endearing to a fault, which won’t––and shouldn’t––stop it from being embraced by moviegoers far and wide.

While Belfast both understands and embodies cinema’s ability to offer a kind of escapism, up until its climax it plays like a retreat from reality.

The result is engaging, tender film-making which tugs at the heart-strings, spurred by a sympathetic cast and the young lead, newcomer Jude Hill. Best compared, perhaps, with John Boorman’s Hope And Glory, Belfast is more led by its love for family and community than detailing the external forces which threaten to tear them apart.

[Branagh] keeps things on an intimate, homey scale, preferring tart Irish humor and wistful boyhood pleasures over expansive flash and grandeur... What works best about Belfast is what Branagh doesn’t do. Though a few Van Morrison songs lilting over the soundtrack do risk cliché, there is otherwise an admirable lack of the expected schmaltz.

Visually stunning, emotionally wrenching and gloriously human, “Belfast” takes one short period from Branagh’s life and finds in it a coming-of-age story, a portrait of a city fracturing in an instant and a profoundly moving lament for what’s been lost during decades of strife in his homeland of Northern Ireland. Plus it’s funny as hell – because if anybody knows how to laugh in the face of tragedy, it’s the Irish.

Branagh’s “Belfast,” a personal story for the writer-director, contains little dramatic momentum, and even less of a coherent visual language... [The] compelling narrative components aren’t enough to propel “Belfast,” a film chock-full of saccharine pieces but devoid of deeply felt stakes.