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

The teenage Dido Elizabeth Belle is impressively played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw with a tender sensibility and a growing awareness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2014

A finely wrought tale of a woman out of time, a film that plays eloquently upon the heartstrings as it interweaves familiar personal intrigue with stirring social history.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2014

This inextricable intertwining of love and justice, private and public, personal and political, is the film's great cri de coeur and its structural brilliance, as costume and courtroom drama comment on, and merge into, each other.

| Jun 13, 2014

Asante's own work of art is lamentably cautious but does, ultimately, throw up things we haven't seen before. It's pretty, in other words, but not entirely vacant.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 13, 2014

With Belle, Asante has succeeded in making a sweeping costume drama that confronts questions of race and gender head on -- something that Merchant Ivory films rarely managed to do.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2014

A spirited, good-natured and crowd-pleasing costume drama.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2014

Asante handles this mainstream commercial picture with assurance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2014

This is disappointingly lifeless, and shallow, and the soundtrack! So many violins, you'll leave feeling as if you've been quite violently smacked around the head with one. Repeatedly.

| Jun 12, 2014

One of the points of Belle, expressed in its central metaphor of the portrait for which the cousins pose, is that someone is always at risk of being painted out of history. The film paints everyone back in.

| Jun 12, 2014

Race, love and social politics are deftly handled in Amma Asante's forcefully-acted feminist period drama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 12, 2014

It's an inert, pompous, un-cinematic piece of cinema.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 12, 2014

Mbatha-Raw does genuine, star-making work here, saying more with her bright and searching gaze, in a film full of politely glazed barbarism, than Dido's position at first allows her to put into words.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 12, 2014

A good-looking and exceedingly polite film where perhaps a more complex one with less good manners would have been better.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 10, 2014

If not a star-making turn, Mbatha-Raw's tough, tender performances should give her plenty of opportunities in sharper fare.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 8, 2014

It's an old-fashioned movie with a very modern streak, centered by a vibrant star turn by Mbatha-Raw, whose watchful, wise Dido makes an enchanting heroine.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 22, 2014

It's all quite well done, if only a touch too decorous.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2014

Charming and stirring.

| May 19, 2014