Review: Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Belfast’ is a personal but muted story of childhood’s end
More than once during “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s wobbly crowd-pleaser about his tumultuous early years in Northern Ireland, the characters sit back in a crowded movie theater and find themselves enraptured. We see their faces beaming up at the screen, backlit by the projector beam and bathed in the glow of images from “One Million Years B.C.” or “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” both excerpted here in all their bright-hued glory. The colors especially stand out because the rest of “Belfast” was shot in black-and-white (by director of photography Haris Zambarloukos), which is to say that this brisk coming-of-age yarn is also a self-conscious ode to the magic of the movies.
Branagh, making a rare foray into personal territory in a career that stretches
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