Film review: Belfast

Kenneth Branagh’s touching film about a boy’s life in the Troubles in Northern Ireland

“With most films, you know exactly what you’ll be getting within the first ten minutes,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Not so with Parallel Mothers: a “delicious and beautifully styled” drama from the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Penélope Cruz stars as Janis, a photographer who has a fling with a forensic anthropologist called Arturo (Israel Elejalde). She gets pregnant, and when Arturo stands by his wife, who has cancer, she decides to raise the baby alone. In hospital, Janis meets Ana (a “terrific” Milena Smit), a teenager whose circumstances are even more complicated, and whose life becomes intertwined with hers. Alongside this domestic drama runs a second plot strand, concerning Janis’s desire to have Arturo exhume the mass grave where her grandfather was buried in the Spanish Civil War. The narrative is twisty and full of surprises, but “it all adds up to an immensely rich, satisfying whole”.

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