Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is a film that holds back. There’s the story it tells, the story it neglects to tell, and the little winks woven throughout the film that suggest it might have wanted to say ...

Or, at least, the Academy Award-nominated plot is largely straightforward. The setting — in the midst of a pivotal flare-up of violence during The Troubles — is anything but. The disconnect between ...

“Belfast” was not my favorite movie of 2021 (not that anyone was asking) but it is the film that gave me the most hope, and at a time when hope is worth more than rubies, or even an Oscar campaign.

During the Troubles, a harrowing 30-year conflict over the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, music opened up alternative ways of understanding identity. Along with boxing ...

Twenty-five years after the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland, Belfast still bears the scars of decades of sectarian violence. So-called peace walls are barriers built to keep Catholic ...

Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is a film about the Troubles that, when you dig into it, isn’t so much about the Troubles at all. A twinkly-eyed childhood memoir – and rigorously fashioned to be an Oscar ...

Kenneth Branagh pours himself a cup of Big Ben tea, and while the downtown Chicago Peninsula Hotel has many plush and refined components, this particular teapot practically dares its user not to spill ...

“Belfast,” a memoir of Kenneth Branagh’s early Protestant childhood in the Troubles-torn Northern Irish city, gives us a child’s-eye view of Catholicism. “Paddy Cavanaugh told me as long as Catholics ...