The Best Picture front-runner is Roma lite.

Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama Belfast opens with a title sequence that takes the viewer on a hovering aerial tour of that historical Northern Irish port metropolis because it seems to be immediately, all red-brick row homes and bright-blue river water. However because the credit come to an finish, we’re abruptly thrown into the previous—August of 1969, to be actual—and into a way more intimate view of the town: a small residential road, seen in deep-focus black-and-white. A lot of the remainder of the movie will keep on with that location, with the motion solely not often leaving the comfortable cobblestoned block that, for 9-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill) and his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie), constitutes the one world they’ve ever identified.

This shift between black-and-white and shade occurs just a few extra occasions through the movie, at all times when Buddy and members of his household—Ma (Caitríona Balfe), Pa (Jamie Dornan), Granny (Judi Dench), or Pop (Ciarán Hinds)—discover themselves within the viewers of some type of spectacle. Once they go to the films to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or attend an area manufacturing of A Christmas Carol, the motion on the display or stage seems in wealthy shade, a vivid demonstration of how a lot movie and theater imply to the little boy who will develop as much as be certainly one of Britain’s foremost actors and administrators. Aside from these few, magical moments, although, there’s no trace of Kenneth/Buddy’s future profession as a thespian. He’s an everyday child, much less within the arts than in Matchbox vehicles and play-fighting on the street with a trash can lid as a defend.

It isn’t lengthy till the preventing turns actual. Within the first scene, Buddy’s trash can lid is pressed into service as an precise defend when a riot breaks out on the block, with Protestant thugs arriving to explode a automobile and terrorize the road’s Catholic residents. Buddy and his household are Protestants, so they’re spared direct hurt. However the younger males inflicting the difficulty put stress on Pa, a carpenter who repeatedly travels to England to search out work, to hitch up with their anti-Catholic gang. The twin battle of the film to come back will contain Pa and Ma’s try to hold their household secure and Buddy’s try to know the non secular and political violence swirling round him, because the capital of Northern Eire enters the bloody interval of its historical past now often known as “the Troubles.”

Although it takes place in opposition to a backdrop of mounting civil unrest, Belfast focuses for probably the most half on smaller home dramas. Buddy’s dad and mom battle to pay their lease and again taxes and argue about whether or not to go away the town for a safer however lonelier life as emigrants someplace within the British Commonwealth. Buddy will get a crush on a Catholic classmate and is pressured by an older woman to shoplift sweets. In the meantime, his grandfather, a former coal miner performed with great heat and humor by Hinds, serves because the household’s ethical anchor and Buddy’s closest confidant, regardless of the previous man’s declining well being. In a stunning, improvised-feeling scene between Hinds and the equally magnificent Dench, Pop serenades Granny with a present tune—“Find out how to Deal with a Girl,” from Camelot—and pulls his protesting spouse to her toes for a gradual dance.

Its story beats are extra acquainted, its message concerning the primacy of household love a bit cornier, and the younger hero’s view of his dad and mom’ marriage significantly extra idealized.

In lots of its stylistic particulars, Belfast resembles one other movie that takes place in its writer-director’s fondly remembered if lower than idyllic childhood: Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexico Metropolis–set Roma, additionally shot in black and white with lengthy, intricately choreographed monitoring photographs. Belfast isn’t the tour de drive that Roma was; its story beats are extra acquainted, its message concerning the primacy of household love a bit cornier, and the younger hero’s view of his dad and mom’ marriage significantly extra idealized. (Ought to two working-class Irish dad and mom actually look this sizzling, or be this madly and exhibitionistically in love?) However good luck getting by this bighearted household drama with out tearing up a minimum of as soon as, particularly when Van Morrison’s acquainted bluesy growl exhibits up on the soundtrack. Which is so much—Morrison’s swelling ballads are so closely used within the soundtrack that at occasions Belfast seems like an prolonged music video. It is a film extra intent on evoking outsize emotions—nostalgia, romantic longing, grief—than on exploring the political and historic themes its setting gestures towards. The Troubles function a backdrop that offers the story suspense and stakes, but when, like me, you go in not understanding a lot about this era of current Irish historical past, you’ll go away scarcely extra knowledgeable.

Nonetheless, Belfast will get the job accomplished in terms of producing waves of emotion within the viewer. The performing is persistently marvelous, together with from the newcomer Jude Hill, solely 9 on the time of filming. He seems on-screen, typically alone and silent, for practically each minute of the film, and his watchful, expressive face recollects the juvenile protagonists of Truffaut movies like The 400 Blows or Small Change. With out the appropriate child within the central function, a film like this may by no means have labored, and to Branagh’s credit score, he directs his junior alter ego with a lightweight contact that lets the character of Buddy appear to be an actual, particular boy, fairly than a logo of misplaced childhood innocence as filtered by grown-up reminiscence. Just a few late scenes pull too arduous on the heartstrings, like a household occasion at which Dornan’s usually stoic character immediately reveals himself to be a karaoke god as he takes the mic to belt a showstopping cowl of “Eternal Love.” However the final shot, a close-up of Judi Dench’s bowed head seen by the blurred glass of a window, totally earns the tears I discovered myself shedding, nearly regardless of myself, because the credit rolled.

[Read: How Kristen Stewart Went From Object of Mockery to Best Actress Front-Runner]

Belfast is already being known as the front-runner in a number of main classes within the Oscar race, together with Greatest Image, Greatest Unique Screenplay, and Greatest Director. The fluid deep-focus cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos (who additionally shot Branagh’s current Agatha Christie adaptation Homicide on the Orient Specific) additionally appears prone to garner some awards season recognition. It’s straightforward to think about this movie cleansing up on the Oscars. It’s a humanist crowd-pleaser with simply sufficient historic heft to depend as one thing greater than a small household drama, and it’s additionally a deeply private labor of affection that, even when it by no means fairly knocks your socks off, appears too honest and too superbly crafted to hate. I’m certain I’ll see higher movies than Belfast this yr—in truth, now that the large end-of-year movies are lastly beginning to roll out, I may even see a greater one this week. But when this tenderhearted dad film does give Branagh his first Oscar (he’s been nominated 5 occasions in numerous classes over the previous 32 years and by no means received), I’d be hard-pressed to be so churlish as to begrudge it its success.