Review of Belfast (2021) by Mauro_Lanari — 16 Apr 2022

(Mauro Lanari).

The story of 9-year-old Buddy, his family and his social context is hurried, hasty and badly sketched, the "amarcord" of Branagh is "an easy film that tries to be difficult, with good intentions at times so evident that they grossly capitulate in the caption and in any case with a too blatant claim to make a mannerist work" (Bruno Surace). "Lacking substance, it remains relentlessly embedded on the surface; leveraging on good feelings and nostalgia for an abstract past, it falls into the trap of the inevitable excess of style" (Beatrice Fiorentino). Shrewd, panderer, simpering: designed to hoard Oscars, it collected only one.