Movie Diary 12/8/2021

Belfast (Kenneth Branagh, 2021). Being a wee lad in Northern Ireland in 1969, rendered in black-and-white snippets and Van Morrison songs (and, touchingly somehow, visits to the picture show to see movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). The film is eager to entertain, too much so, although if you think of the incidents as coming from the mind of a ten-year-old boy, this tendency becomes more forgivable. By comparison with John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, this is mostly a series of charming sketches.