Gugu Mbatha-Raw's skill and cinematic charisma are undeniable.

| Feb 13, 2024

Belle is appealing: intelligent, engaged and self-possessed.

| Oct 13, 2022

Belle forms a rather interesting complement to another Fox Searchlight property, Steve McQueen’s much lauded 12 Years a Slave...

| Sep 13, 2022

In a star-making performance, Mbatha-Raw breathes life into what could've easily been a woman of color stand-in for a Jane Austen character.

| Jan 20, 2021

Belle is a movie with commitment, a well-composed storyline and an intoxicating look and feel...

| Aug 13, 2020

Viewers won't be shaken by this true story so much as mildly stirred as they follow the title character's unusual path through British society in the 1700s.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 31, 2020

A superbly plum role inhabited gloriously by Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 30, 2019

Belle's lavish visuals and smart dialogue are as finely tooled as in an A-list Jane Austen epic. But aside from the issue of a woman's subjugation, the dramatic stakes are raised...

| Aug 7, 2019

As purely enjoyable as it is important, Belle has opened the door to a new era that can only get better from here.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 14, 2019

Belle has a great lead performance from a Black actress in a Black woman director's film of a Black woman's script about a Black woman in European history (who wasn't a slave): an opportunity that doesn't come very often for audiences.

| Mar 13, 2019

While indignant in its stance, the film is never preachy, instead presenting a strong sense of morality that is difficult to ignore with-out resorting to unnecessary emotional histrionics, focussing instead on the characters.

| Mar 5, 2019

Director Amma Asante has crafted a film that is part Jane Austen and part historical drama, with one element more interesting than the other. Mbatha-Raw carries the film well.

| Feb 1, 2019

...a provocative essence of the well-received 19-century costume drama. British-Ghanaian filmmaker Amma Asante oversees an inviting and lyrical exposition entrenched in the societal shades of rejection, feminism, racism and cultural identity crisis.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 14, 2018

All in all, it's an enjoyable film, it's just hard to see how such a powder keg of issues could burn so slowly.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 3, 2018

Romantic, elegant and triumphant, Belle is as deft an exploration of the intersection of race, class and gender as I've seen on any kind of screen.

| Aug 28, 2018

It's clear that Mbatha-Raw is a precocious talent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2018

Belle is 12 Years a Slave written by Legally Blonde's Elle Woods: a frothing bonnet-athon that owes more to Jane Austen than it does to William Wilberforce.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2018

Though the story is set up elegantly, by the halfway point it's obvious where it's headed and it ploddingly sets about going there.

| Jan 3, 2018

If Spielberg had commissioned Jane Austen to write the screenplay for Amistad, Belle is pretty much what we would have gotten. It's a sumptuous period piece reflecting on 18th-century social mores: rank, revenue, and-in this case-race.

| Original Score: 8.5/10 | Dec 3, 2017

With its unique perspective and director Amma Asante's choice to avoid heavy-handedness, Belle is an effective vehicle for its message.

| Nov 22, 2017