It's tearjerking, but at times feels like a Hallmark card.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 19, 2024

Whimsical in the most imaginative sense, their conversations make it very easy to give [Kenneth Branagh] the benefit of the doubt. If the reality was not like this, it should have been.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 7, 2022

The film, with a soundtrack of mostly familiar but appropriate Van Morrison songs, is clearly a labour of love, and the final scenes are immensely moving.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 7, 2022

Kenneth Branagh's unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 22, 2022

I loved it.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 22, 2022

The film is manipulative, and sentimental, and it does sometimes feel derivative... But it is also sincere, affectionate, involving and presses its buttons so deftly I welled up exactly as I was supposed to. At least three times.

| Jan 21, 2022

A twinkly-eyed childhood memoir - and rigorously fashioned to be an Oscar frontrunner.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 21, 2022

A syrupy memoir offering little insight into a turbulent time.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 20, 2022

At its best, Belfast recalls Hope and Glory, John Boorman's 1987 film based on its director's own Blitz-battered childhood.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 20, 2022

It lights up the dark, the way even now a fill-um can.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 20, 2022

Branagh's theatrical career has made him expert in holding and moving an audience -- and, since this is a once-in-a-lifetime project, why not give it everything and embrace full sentimentality?

| Jan 20, 2022

Slight but winning.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 20, 2022

Possibly the most uplifting film ever made about a time of unending violence, Kenneth Branagh's Belfast comes with a bruised heart and an unquenchable spirit of optimism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 14, 2022

...both grand and intimate, gooey sweet and shockingly violent, life-affirming and cynical.

| Dec 28, 2021

'Belfast' is not just a movie photographed in black and white, but a story told that way - the Troubles as coming-of-age narrative, a thing happening in the background while a young boy reckons with bickering parents and how to talk to girls.

| Dec 28, 2021

One could fault Branagh, one supposes, for not painting a grimmer, more naturalistic portrait of his problematic birthplace, but his mission is not to recreate childhood as history, but rather as a highly selective source of one's artistic inspiration.

| Dec 10, 2021

Branagh tries to pair his pint-sized protagonist's moments of joy with the harsh realities of living in a society coming apart. But in its carefully choreographed nostalgia, it is all too twinkly eyed to make much of an impact.

| Nov 23, 2021

Gorgeously shot (Haris Zambarloukos) B&W footage, with exquisite lighting and ample portrait-like closeups, makes this memoir eye-catching and enchanting.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 23, 2021

Belfast is Branagh's love letter to his family, his neighborhood, a way of life that doesn't exist any longer. It's neither complex nor rigorous -- nostalgia rarely is -- but it does leave a lump in the throat.

| Nov 18, 2021

It's like Branagh is flipping through a family photo album, giving us curated glimpses of these relatives and their lives.

| Nov 15, 2021