Movies: Belfast

Kenneth Branagh’s penetrating new movie about Northern Ireland

Kenneth Branagh’s fable in black, white and gold splashed with deliberate scenes in color couldn’t be more relevant and timely. The story is a contrived slice of life. But Branagh, whose brilliant career spans Shakespeare’s classics, Disney’s Cinderella (2015) and Thor and performances in everything from an Agatha Christie adaptation to Swing Kids and Dunkirk, serves a neat slice.

Capturing the Northern Irish city’s smokestacks, grayness and troubles, writer and director Branagh’s nostalgic film, Belfast, lulls the audience into an everyday sort of Irish charm. The working class family he depicts includes two sons, a married couple and paternal grandparents. They live on a small street where everyone knows one another. The boys attend school. They’re poor. Only the father works for pay and that happens offscreen, far from Belfast. This is central to the plot, which is set in 1969.

That historical year unfolds with suspense in the smallness of a Protestant family’s lives. Carefully, in …