As director’s movie is nominated for seven Oscars, residents of Mountcollyer Street recall when the Troubles started
Little remains of the street where Kenneth Branagh was raised.
It is the day after the Oscar nominations and Branagh has professed he is “dazed and delighted” and in a “beautiful state of shock” over the seven Oscar nominations his film Belfast has received.
Continue reading...Branagh’s spirited performance as Poirot and a big-name ensemble cast can’t keep this stale and two-dimensional whodunnit afloat
Long coronavirally delayed, Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie movie puffs effortfully into harbour. It’s the classic whodunnit about a murder on a steamer making its way down the river in Egypt with an Anglo-American boatful of waxy-faced cameos aboard. The horrible homicide means that one of the passengers will have to spring into action, and this is of course the amply moustached Hercule Poirot, played by Branagh himself. It is Poirot who interviews suspects, supervises corpse-storage in the ship’s galley freezer cabinet and delivers the final unmasking – and all without the captain insisting that the Egyptian police should possibly get involved.
Screenwriter Michael Green has adapted the 1937 novel with some new inventions: some people of colour are introduced, and Christie’s intense dislike for her wealthy-hypocrite leftwing character has been dialled down. Most startlingly, Green invents a very good prelude showing the young Poirot’s service in the trenches of the first world war, and the origin of that moustache. Nothing in the rest of this rather stale and two-dimensional tale matches the brio of that opening.
Continue reading...The director’s first cousin Martin Hamilton tells of family and the Troubles that went on to inspire an acclaimed memoir
There is one man with very personal reasons for finding the scenes of sectarian intimidation in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s film homage to his home city particularly haunting – his first cousin, Martin Hamilton.
Hamilton, who grew up with Branagh and his family in inner-city north Belfast, says the images of Catholic families being forced out of the mainly Protestant district brought back painful memories of his own fractured friendships that were lost in the Troubles.
Continue reading...After a year of criticism over diversity, the Golden Globes have come up with a decent slate of nominees, with Gaga surely the favourite for best actress
• Full list of 2020 nominations
The Golden Globes nomination list has been announced with a solemn introduction from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s president Helen Hoehne, to the effect that the Globes’ much-criticised controlling body was “trying to be better” and that its constituent membership was more diverse than at any other time in its history. Which is better, I suppose, than being less diverse than at any time in its history.
At any rate, leading the pack are Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s unashamed heartwarmer about the home town of his early childhood, with seven nominations and Jane Campion’s stark, twisty western-Gothic psychodrama The Power of the Dog, set in 1920s Montana with Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled, angry cattleman who begins a toxic duel with his new sister-in-law played by Kirsten Dunst and her sensitive teenage son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Continue reading...Nightmarishness meets nostalgia as Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench star in a scintillating Troubles-era coming-of-age tale
There is a terrific warmth and tenderness to Kenneth Branagh’s elegiac, autobiographical movie about the Belfast of his childhood: spryly written, beautifully acted and shot in a lustrous monochrome, with set pieces, madeleines and epiphanies that feel like a more emollient version of Terence Davies. Some may feel that the film is sentimental or that it does not sufficiently conform to the template of political anger and despair considered appropriate for dramas about Northern Ireland and the Troubles. And yes, there is certainly a spoonful of sugar (or two) in the mix, with some mandatory Van Morrison on the soundtrack. There’s a key climactic scene about how you disarm a gunman in the middle of a riot if you have no gun yourself, which has to be charitably indulged.
But this film has such emotional generosity and wit and it tackles a dilemma of the times not often understood: when, and if, to pack up and leave Belfast? Is it an understandable matter of survival or an abandonment of your beloved home town to the extremists? (Full disclosure: my own dad left Belfast for England, though well before the era of this film.)
Continue reading...Reviewers in the US have lauded the film, but complain it is too difficult to understand and needs subtitles
Kenneth Branagh’s new autobiographical film, Belfast, is tipped for Oscar glory, but his home town will not be happy if it’s in the foreign language category.
Hollywood reviewers who have lauded the film’s storytelling and acting complain the Northern Ireland accents are difficult to understand and require subtitles.
Continue reading...From an unusual first kiss to a horrifying shock death, Guardian writers pick their most impactful big screen bits of the year
Spoilers ahead
Continue reading...Go with it, and Christopher Nolan’s high-concept action romp will leave you ripping off your face mask for air, even as you wonder what it was all about
Who shall save cinema? Not James Bond apparently. There’s been a brand-new Daniel Craig spectacular ready to go since Easter, arguably just the thing to get punters’ actual bums back on actual seats. But Team 007 is wimping out, unwilling to splurge their product irreversibly into some potential new ruinous lockdown – and Disney has suffered a comparable bottle-loss, dumping its live-action version of the Mulan legend on to streaming services.
So it’s up to the mighty Christopher Nolan to take the heroic, morale-boosting gamble and open his big new film in cinemas. Tenet is a gigantically confusing, gigantically entertaining and gigantically gigantic metaphysical action thriller in which a protagonist called The Protagonist battles cosmic incursions from the future while time flows backwards and forwards at the same time. There’s a 747 plane that crashes into a warehouse and then uncrashes back out of it, for reasons that are not immediately obvious.
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