Belle - Movie Reviews (2024)

Gugu Mbatha-Raw's skill and cinematic charisma are undeniable.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

Belle is appealing: intelligent, engaged and self-possessed.

Full Review | Oct 13, 2022

Belle forms a rather interesting complement to another Fox Searchlight property, Steve McQueen’s much lauded 12 Years a Slave...

Full Review | Sep 13, 2022

In a star-making performance, Mbatha-Raw breathes life into what could've easily been a woman of color stand-in for a Jane Austen character.

Full Review | Jan 20, 2021

Belle is a movie with commitment, a well-composed storyline and an intoxicating look and feel...

Full Review | Aug 13, 2020

Viewers won't be shaken by this true story so much as mildly stirred as they follow the title character's unusual path through British society in the 1700s.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 31, 2020

A superbly plum role inhabited gloriously by Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 30, 2019

Belle's lavish visuals and smart dialogue are as finely tooled as in an A-list Jane Austen epic. But aside from the issue of a woman's subjugation, the dramatic stakes are raised...

Full Review | Aug 7, 2019

As purely enjoyable as it is important, Belle has opened the door to a new era that can only get better from here.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 14, 2019

Belle has a great lead performance from a Black actress in a Black woman director's film of a Black woman's script about a Black woman in European history (who wasn't a slave): an opportunity that doesn't come very often for audiences.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2019

While indignant in its stance, the film is never preachy, instead presenting a strong sense of morality that is difficult to ignore with-out resorting to unnecessary emotional histrionics, focussing instead on the characters.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2019

Director Amma Asante has crafted a film that is part Jane Austen and part historical drama, with one element more interesting than the other. Mbatha-Raw carries the film well.

Full Review | Feb 1, 2019

...a provocative essence of the well-received 19-century costume drama. British-Ghanaian filmmaker Amma Asante oversees an inviting and lyrical exposition entrenched in the societal shades of rejection, feminism, racism and cultural identity crisis.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 14, 2018

All in all, it's an enjoyable film, it's just hard to see how such a powder keg of issues could burn so slowly.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 3, 2018

Romantic, elegant and triumphant, Belle is as deft an exploration of the intersection of race, class and gender as I've seen on any kind of screen.

Full Review | Aug 28, 2018

It's clear that Mbatha-Raw is a precocious talent.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2018

Belle is 12 Years a Slave written by Legally Blonde's Elle Woods: a frothing bonnet-athon that owes more to Jane Austen than it does to William Wilberforce.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2018

Though the story is set up elegantly, by the halfway point it's obvious where it's headed and it ploddingly sets about going there.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2018

If Spielberg had commissioned Jane Austen to write the screenplay for Amistad, Belle is pretty much what we would have gotten. It's a sumptuous period piece reflecting on 18th-century social mores: rank, revenue, and-in this case-race.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Dec 3, 2017

With its unique perspective and director Amma Asante's choice to avoid heavy-handedness, Belle is an effective vehicle for its message.

Full Review | Nov 22, 2017