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Branagh’s Belfast packs a powerful emotional punch
Damon Smith reviews the latest new releases to watch in the cinema
BELFAST (12A)
LIFE in black and white seems more colourful and vibrant in writerdirector Kenneth Branagh’s wondrous coming-of-age drama, drawn from the film-maker’s vast well of childhood experiences in 1960s Belfast.
Sincerely dedicated to the people of the Northern Irish capital, Branagh’s most personal film unfolds from the perspective of a nine-year-old rapscallion called Buddy (played by luminous newcomer Jude Hill), who we first see romping around the streets with his pals, brandishing a home-made wooden sword and using an upturned dustbin lid as a shield.
The cheeky tyke is slaying imaginary dragons but the invisible enemy, which is poised to roar and tear apart Protestant and Catholic communities, is a two-headed hydra of political and nationalistic fervour.
Principal characters in Branagh’s script are referred to simply by their familial ties to Buddy – Ma, Pa, Granny and Pop – tapping into an undercurrent of charming childhood innocence that insulates the boy from the harsh reality of barricades being hastily erected at the end of the street or a local supermarket being looted during a riot.
Indeed, when the prospect of leaving Belfast for good solidifies, Buddy is most troubled about leaving behind his school crush, a girl called Catherine, who repeatedly scores top marks in teacher Miss Lewis’s tests of the children’s times tables.
The simple mathematics of Branagh’s crowd-pleasing film add up to a beautifully crafted valentine to a city in the grip of devastating change and a resilient and warmhearted people, who mine humour in adversity.
Buddy (Hill) and his family – Pa (Jamie Dornan), Ma (Caitiona
Balfe) and older brother Will (Lewis McAskie) – live in a predominantly Protestant district of north Belfast, cheek by jowl with Catholic neighbours.
Granny (Dame Judi Dench) and Pop (Ciaran Hinds) live a few streets away. Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) and his comrades target Catholic houses in Buddy’s neighbourhood, claiming they are “lookin’ to cleanse the community a wee bit”.
Hostilities result in family members going through barricade checkpoints and local men patrolling nighttime streets with torches. For Pa, it is an unthinkable opportunity to transplant the clan to Australia or Canada: “An escape route”.
Distinguished by Haris Zambarloukos’s monochrome cinematography, Belfast relies on a terrific ensemble cast led by the exuberant Hill to paper over slight narrative shortfalls in a rose-tinted script drizzled with nostalgia.
Balfe’s fearful matriarch is the film’s beating heart and she powerfully conveys the emotional turmoil of a family’s forcible displacement from their home.
Branagh’s delicate touch results in a sprightly running time that leaves us hankering for more.
9/10
NIGHTMARE ALLEY (15)
IN the misery-soaked opening section of Guillermo del Toro’s noir thriller, adapted by the Oscar-winning
Mexican director and Kim Morgan from William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, a booze-sodden, retired mentalist warns the slippery anti-hero to steer clear of clairvoyance.
“No good comes out of a spook show,” he blathers, hungover.
His lamentable warning falls on deaf ears, on screen and off.
The charlatan protagonist falsely communes with the dead to exploit paying customers’ grief and del
Toro tethers a starry cast, including Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett,
Toni Collette and Willem Dafoe, to a tawdry tale of duplicity and avarice that runs dry of tension before the tangled plot enters its third languid hour.
This Nightmare Alley doesn’t have to jump through censorship hoops like the 1947 film version headlining Tyrone Power as the seedy carnival worker destined for an almighty fall from grace. Here, a teasing glimpse of full-frontal male nudity in a steaming bathtub and some suggestive soaping secure a 15 certificate almost as much as spurts of stomach-churning violence including an inglorious end for a live fowl and a human skull crushed in queasy close-up.
Fantastical, otherworldly elements, a signature of del Toro’s earlier work including Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape Of Water, are all smoke and mirrors and the con feels like it may be on us to muster concern for underwritten doomed characters as that headless chicken comes home to roost.
Cooper lacks menace and is, to quote Collette’s bogus medium, simply “easy on the eyes, honey”.
Thankfully, Blanchett slinks delectably through the second half as a femme fatale psychologist, who has accumulated enough personal secrets about her clientele to keep herself in velvet capes until the soft lighting dims. Stanton Carlisle (Cooper) joins a carnival run by Clem Hoatley (Dafoe) and learns tricks of the trade from fading double act Zeena and Pete Krumbein (Collette, David Strathairn).
The newcomer beguiles naive showgirl Molly Cahill (Rooney
Mara) and the lovebirds run away from Clem, and the protection of strong man Bruno (Ron Perlman), to establish themselves as a speciality act at the Copacabana club in Buffalo, New York.
A deception involving Dr Lilith Ritter (Blanchett) and her former patient, industrialist Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), is a swindle too far for Stanton. Nightmare Alley seduces the eyes with glorious production and costume design but the heart goes a-wanting, despite simmering sexual tension between Cooper and Blanchet.