Pretty much all of your sharper, tougher Telluride critics have problems with Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. The more obliging middle-of-the-road types (critics, columnists and industry folk alike) have oddly fallen for it.
You can’t grab people by the lapels and order them to have a sense of taste about such matters. If someone likes Belfast or finds it Oscar-worthy, okay — shrug and throw your hands up. But when someone says Belfast is “one of the best films [they’ve] ever seen,” all kinds of crazy reactions come to mind. Because it’s fair, I believe, to compare Belfast’s family dynamic with that of Fred Savage and The Wonder Years, as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich did today.
Either you’re the type who can tolerate or, God forbid, embrace cloying emotionalism, or you aren’t..