BELFAST

Kenneth Branagh's "Belfast" is a love letter to the city in which he was born and raised but it is also so much more; a film about family and about history, both recent and history going back a few hundred years. It is obviously made with great affection and considerable ambition and it gives us a strife-torn Belfast as seen through the eyes of a child, (the young Branagh, here called Buddy), but as someone who, as a young adult lived through 'The Troubles', it isn't 'as it was'.

That hardly matters, of course. If the film never feels wholly authentic, (it's at its weakest in the scenes of violence), Branagh's childlike vision of Belfast in 1969 gives it a mythic, almost surreal, quality greatly enhanced by Haris Zambarloukos' superb cinematography, mostly in black and white. The events it portrays did happen if not quite in the way Branagh imagines, rather than remembers, them and happily the history takes a backseat to his beautifully realised picture of a family, (his family), at the centre.

His original screenplay is both funny and intelligent and he gets wonderful performances from his adult cast, (Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe as his parents; Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench as his grandparents). Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Jude Hill, an untried young Belfast boy, as Branagh's alter-ego. Hills is not a natural actor and his line-readings are amateurish at best and he's onscreen for most of the film. He doesn't destroy the picture; he just lets it down.

Of course, if you haven't grown up here in Northern Ireland and have no first-hand knowledge of the events, the film's sweet sentimentality and Branagh's obvious skill as a filmmaker should win you over and there is already talk of Oscars, (Hinds, Balfe, Zambar.loukos and Branagh as writer would be deserving nominees), while the songs of Van Morrison greatly enhance the soundtrack.