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Belfast is a nostalgic look at a difficult era. The struggles are taken seriously, but Belfast looks beyond, to the innocence at the center of the turmoil. The film entertains themes of family, home, and community. However, it focuses on slice-of-life moments rather than digging too deep. This allows the actors to express themselves in heartfelt ways across the emotional spectrum. Caitriona Balfe stands out for nailing stirring scenes, but Jude Hill deserves credit for piloting the film at such a young age. Belfast may not provide a groundbreaking narrative, but its sincerity is a worthy supplement.
Meanwhile, the filmmaking of Belfast is rock solid. The production design is convincing, the effects are impactful, and the editing has clever moments. Plus, the sound gets symbolic and silent at key points. Simultaneously, the music consistently elevates the film by capturing both the bittersweet mood and the classic time period. Lastly, the cinematography is the star of Belfast because its shots are composed with suggestion, symbolism, and beauty. Visual symmetry, configuration, and lighting are utilized masterfully to evoke significant emotion. Overall, Kenneth Branagh has directed a superb film that is both sentimental and poignant.
Writing: 8/10
Direction: 9/10
Cinematography: 10/10
Acting: 9/10
Editing: 8/10
Sound: 9/10
Score/Soundtrack: 9/10
Production Design: 8/10
Casting: 7/10
Effects: 8/10
Overall Score: 8.5/10
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I finally stopped procrastinating watching Belfast, one of the main front runners at the Oscars this year. With a total of seven nominations including; Best Picture, Kenneth Branagh for Best Director, Ciarán Hinds for Best Supporting Actor, Judi Dench for Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound, and “Down to Joy” for Best Original Song. I really think it stands a big chance at a lot of these. I really liked it but I don’t think it should win best picture, but I think it could win because the Academy likes stories about telling stories. I think Branagh stands a good chance for Director and screenplay, I really liked the work he did on this movie. You could tell so much of it was very personal and important to him. Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench are fantastic here as Pop and Granny and deliver the best performances of the film. They contributed to two of the three times I cried. The sound isn’t something I noticed much while watching and while “Down to Joy” is a good song I think there are much better songs this year. Jude Hill is truly phenomenal here and one of the best child actors I’ve ever seen, this kid has a great career ahead of him. Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan are so good as the Mom and Dad and deal with a lot of heavy choices for the safety of their kids. Also, I was beyond distracted by Dornan every time he was on screen, the man is so hot. I really liked the first transition from color to black and white and then the small mixes of color scattered around until the end are so well done. This period of strife is one I’m not familiar with and I wish I knew more about this time. No kid should ever have to live through something like that. Watching this right after The Eyes of Tammy Faye was very jarring. From the love some people put into the world in the name of god, to the pain people inflict on others in the name of god. It makes me sick that people of the same religion would do this to each other and put children in the middle of harms way. Belfast is a deeply moving image of a horrible time for the people of Ireland beautifully captured through amazing performances and directing. 9/10 from me, just a few pacing issues. -Tyler.
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3/5
Drama/Coming-of-age
Amidst the civil unrest of The Troubles, young schoolboy Buddy (Jude Hill) reflects on his life, as
his family considers leaving their home of Belfast permanently.
To sum Belfast up, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Oscar bait so shamelessly be Oscar bait, to quite
this extent. Since the Academy Nominees have been released, I have had some very strong feelings
about the categories that this film is questionably up for, most egregiously Best Director for Kenneth
Branagh… a section that Denis Villeneuve is absent from?! I don’t think Belfast is bad and I don’t think it’s incredible either: it’s frustratingly middling yet has become an awards darling and it’s painfully clear why. Sir Kenneth Branagh is in the directing chair, it’s been hyped in interviews to be semi autobiographical and therefore tell a personal story, it’s filmed in black-and-white and it frames itself in the trailers to be tackling the issue of a major historical and social crisis.
Unfortunately, there’s a persisting problem with all 4 of those aspects which make the film feel kind of well-meaning but a little pretentious, and this is an overall disappointingly surface-level experience.
Starting with the good, the performances and the camerawork are both more than solid. Despite the writing leaving him as a fairly uninteresting protagonist, Jude Hill is commendable in the lead role, effectively channelling the emotional extremes and mannerisms of a child in his position, presenting a performance that comes off as poignant and genuine. As for the rest of the cast, I’d consider Caitríona Balfe the standout, playing the part of Buddy’s conflicted mother who’s torn about whether to stay, which would compromise their safety and wellbeing, or leave, which would mean abandoning their roots and home. It’s here that Belfast achieves its intention of presenting the tragic and unfair difficulties for the Irish, whose neighbourhoods became rife with violence, leaving them with one of the only options to be moving to England… the country which had arguably caused all the unrest with its complicated history of discriminative, dismissive and disrespectful treatment of the former. Jamie Dornan is fine but nothing special like some have hyped his supporting performance to be, and the same goes for the charming but underwhelming turn from Judi Dench, however, I did find Ciarán Hinds’s cheeky grandpa to Buddy to be quite a likeable scene-stealer.
What I appreciated about Haris Zambarloukos’s cinematography is that it nicely complements the performances in a manner slightly evocative of Wes Anderson’s distinct style. The camera isn’t necessarily static but often takes its time with neat framing to allow the performances to be fleshed out and take the spotlight, almost like drawing a portrait of the characters. I also quite like the way that Belfast implements small bursts of colour at cinema showings and theatre performances, almost reversing the contrast of when a black-and-white picture is being watched in a scene from a film with regular colour. However, I really did not like the opening and ending shots, which might sound random but it ties into my first main criticism of Belfast: it’s a film with a deceptively surface- level and uninspired nature hidden by the self-proclaimed pretence of it being a ‘sublime’, ‘beautiful’ coming-of-age story that allows it to take extensive liberties with aspects such as structure.
Essentially, this film opens on various shots of modern Belfast in colour before switching to black-and-white, making us think about how the city’s changed, a theme which is completely irrelevant to our main story set in the late 1960s. It’s one of the laziest ways that this film could’ve began, making it all the more frustrating when it ends on modern day Belfast, again in colour, acting as if the narrative was coherent enough for this returning idea to seem clever. To provide an example of a film where this works, Schindler’s List’s jump from the end of WW2 to the 1990s is gut-punching and poignant because the flash-forward is entirely justified by the fact that we are seeing these real-life people, who were played by actors as their younger versions in the Holocaust, still alive and remembering the countless victims who died to the Nazi regime. The effect is that it blurs the lines between a film dramatising a historical tragedy, and a documentary featuring the survivors and their memories, which starkly reminds the audience of how real all the horrors of the Holocaust were, while also bringing an immense layer of authenticity and respect for the Jewish people who made it.
Therefore, Schindler’s List presents a direct link with the characters/people in their past and present forms, in one of the most unique and emotional ways I’ve ever seen put on film, entirely coherently.
On the other hand, all Belfast offers us is some establishing shots of buildings straight out of a travel documentary advertising the city as the latest and greatest European holiday location, before cutting to the 1960s setting. I understand that this was meant to present a ‘jarring’ contrast between the grand and beautiful city today, and the troubled times that the Irish went through back then but there simply isn’t enough for this to carry any emotional potency or memorable significance, compared to the masterful and heart-wrenching effect that Steven Spielberg crafted with the end of Schindler’s List.
So, what else makes Belfast not achieve its intentions and the potential of its base ideas other than annoying and drawn-out shots of architecture, you may wonder? Tonal issues aplenty is one answer but, before that, I must address another of my biggest qualms with this film that not many seem to have picked out: I kind of struggled to connect with the characters because we don’t get enough depth to work with, and the story is indecisive and messy in its structure. Belfast doesn’t really venture beyond the simple plot summary I gave at the beginning of this review, as Branagh trusts that a ‘slice of life’ of a young child in this time and place is interesting enough to sustain an entire film. It’s fortunate that it doesn’t scratch 100 minutes but even what they have is too long with such a lack of intricacies and nuances to the plot, as there was little going on to keep me hooked, beyond the tragic conflict and terrorism going on in this character’s home neighbourhood. Therefore, I was pretty disappointed to realise that this film isn’t really about the Troubles; we only get two major sequences of riots that feel weirdly disjunctive to the almost feel-good energy of the family setting, but, again, I’ll get back to the tonal problems later. Movies like Belfast, that stay ‘relaxed’ and aren’t massively plot-driven can work but they have to then make up for that by focusing on interesting characters and their dynamics, which this film doesn’t deliver on. I couldn’t figure out who was meant to be the ‘main character’, as it’s marketed to be the kid and I did understand that it was meant to be from his perspective, but he’s just a normal child, with little of interest to offer, e.g. he ‘cutely’ has a crush at primary school, he’s naïve talking to his sister about which names ‘are’ Catholic and which ‘are’ Protestant, he likes talking to his grandfather about anything and everything: it’s not bad stuff but it’s uninventive. It doesn’t help that we spend quite a lot of the runtime away from him, with other family members that I’m really not that bothered about because we don’t know who they are other than maybe one of their base beliefs about an event or circumstance that’s part of the plot, which is problematic as that kind of leaves them as just plot devices; they act as catalysts in how the narrative goes but don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. All this makes me wonder what happened with that 98-minute runtime for little character to have actually been presented and developed, and I retrospectively think that Belfast can feel like a lot of scenes cascading over one another with some of them having great stuff that I liked, however, this makes for an overall non-cohesive and uneven structure. It may be that Branagh intended for it to feel like the directionless ramblings of a child because life is messy, and the feelings arguably more-so for a kid, but it unfortunately didn’t work for me.
For my final main point, I’d like to begin my quoting Independent’s review of Belfast, as they summed it up best: this is “A film about the Troubles that isn’t about the Troubles at all”. We open on a stark and terrifying sequence of violence, heavily marketed in at least the main trailer, that sets the film up to be a heart-breaking look at how civil unrest affects innocent people’s lives and safety.
However, the film quickly shifts to less of a moving drama and more of a lighter, nostalgic set of memoirs from a past life (Branagh’s, from what he’s told the press), making it feel almost disrespectful to what was going on, as if Belfast was just using the appeal of tackling the heavy subject matter to trick viewers and critics into believing that it’s something emotional and important. For a film from someone who lived through it all, it’s quite jarring to watch it frequently shy away from the cold, difficult reality of what was going on at the time, and you really get the sense that Branagh has no idea of what he wants it to actually be. It feels as if he’s tactlessly trying to combine two separate movies, one a coming-of-age story about forging a connection to your hometown, the other occasionally a historical drama about violence in 1960s Ireland, and spoiler alert: they don’t gel together.
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