Belfast

Taken all together, Branagh’s film is in its own special way like a cinematic equivalent of the Irish brogue that fills it: It’s lovely, it’s lyrical and it’s next to impossible not to be swept up by its charms.

No wonder Kenneth Branagh’s funny, touching and vital look at his own coming of age in Northern Ireland’s turbulent capital city is the Oscar frontrunner for Best Picture. No movie this year cuts a clearer, truer path of the heart. It’s his personal best.

A gorgeous, proudly unreliable glance over the shoulder. A tribute to an often maligned city.

The film is not a masterpiece, but a memory box. Comforting, inviting, and one you won’t mind keeping close.

What Branagh has made is a kind of home movie writ large. It is a private stash of memories and imaginings, which touches only glancingly on the wide and troubled world beyond, and which feels most alive when it turns to face the consolations of home and the thrills that lie in wait on the big screen.

Lyrical and episodic, Belfast is often affecting, if far too sentimental.

Even while understanding that much of Belfast is supposed to be from the perspective of Buddy (Jude Hill), a young boy who witnesses the beginning of Ireland’s “Troubles” in his working-class neighborhood (and serves as something of a stand-in for writer-director Kenneth Branagh), I still felt a type of artistic naivete at work—a belief that all you need is black-and-white cinematography and a cute kid to create something of deep meaning and emotion.

Beautiful but sad. Perhaps more meaningful to those of us who were of age to remember Van Morrison and the original Star Trek TV series and the premieres of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and High Noon, not to mention Rachel Welch in One Million Years BC. My wife and I have an additional personal connection with this material because as young marrieds we hosted various Belfast Tweens for several summers, sent by their parents for their safety and to learn that there was a place on the planet where Catholics and Protestants got along, intermarried, and visited each other's churches. It's also a cautionary tale, illustrating where America could be headed if we don't get our act together.

Good performances and there is a sweet heart behind this but it's way too slow.

It was ok movie, but I think it didn't show enough also about the story what was happening around. It is sort of told in the way of the boy's eyes, not seeing why or what is really goin on. It's ok movie, but for me missed something

Completely boring , acting is completely unrealistic, there is no drama no tension. Typical tropes to be considered an “Oscar” movie. Black and white, old movies playing on the tvs, annoying close up. Only like 3 locations, a house a street and a school. All in all very lame , boring and really no tension or anything whatsoever. Was em the whole issue was that the family had to move to uk ? Was that really a big deal? Honestly disappointing

An offensive and manipulative depiction of one of the most traumatising conflict in recent history.