Blitz: an 'odyssey through Britain at war'

The 'excellent' Saoirse Ronan stars in this 'cracking' film

George (Elliott Heffernan) and Rita (Saoirse Ronan) stand in Paddington Station, in 1940, in the film Blitz
The film, set in 1940s London, is moving and 'morally provoking'
(Image credit: Alamy / FlixPix)

The artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen has said he was inspired to write Blitz "after seeing a faded photograph of a black child with other evacuees at the height of the Luftwaffe's bombing of London", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail.

The result is a "thoroughly enjoyable" adventure, set in 1940 and starring Elliott Heffernan as George, a mixed-race nine-year-old whose mother (the "excellent" Saoirse Ronan) packs him off from Paddington Station with a cardboard tag around his neck.

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Racism features in the story too, and in a way that in places feels a bit thinly drawn – but in essence, this is "a cracking yarn, nicely told". The film is certainly "worth seeing", said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. "But it doesn't have quite the impact" of some of McQueen's other films ("12 Years a Slave", "Hunger"); nor does it quite know what it is. Sometimes, it's "a dark Dickensian tale"; other times, it's a feel-good film "about plucky women standing up for themselves". At its "nerve-shredding best, it's a stark depiction of a situation in which death could strike at any moment"; but it's more a "scrapbook" than a "fully realised film".