Critic Reviews

The story is minimal, just a series of events in the life of a young man and his circle, but every scene is rendered with such authenticity that it’s riveting, almost like it’s a privilege to be stepping back in time.

The 82-year-old director has a light, assured touch and wrote a script that gives his actors space to shine.

Given its loose-knit narrative, the film doesn’t have anything like a conventional structure. Yet it’s steadily engrossing due to Boorman’s surpassing skills as both a storyteller and a director.

Like "Hope and Glory," Boorman's Queen and Country finds exhilarating comedy in places usually reserved for drama, violence, loss.

Queen and Country doesn’t quite have the bittersweet intensity of its precursor. The terrible magic of the war is missing, and so is the heightened, wide-eyed perceptiveness of the child protagonist.

The stakes may seem low, but these high jinks resound with abstract generational import, the various episodes cohering into a moving portrait of a nation that couldn’t account for all it had lost in a war that it won.

In an industry afflicted by sequelitis, it has taken John Boorman almost three decades to make the sequel to his much-cherished “Hope and Glory,” but Queen and Country turns out to be well worth the wait.

Boorman retains the sense of melancholy and, ultimately, optimism from the first film. That, coupled with excellent portrayals of what could have been stock war-movie characters, makes Queen and Country a worthy follow-up to a classic.

Less vibrant than the original, but equally thoughtful and funny.

Queen & Country is hardly reinventing the wheel, but it's charming, evocative and (mostly) well-performed, and were Boorman to continue with his autobiographical cycle, we'd certainly welcome further installments.