Hope and Glory

Hope and Glory is a wonderful film, an intelligent, heartfelt, personal, and marvelously entertaining look at what it was like to grow up in wartorn England. Read full review

Hope and Glory is so enjoyable you want it to be a 16-part mini-series. When it's over, you sit staring at the credits, as you would the last page of a good book, wishing for another chapter. Read full review

It's a rich, funny, bracing film, one of Boorman's finest.[06 Nov 1987, p.41]

John Boorman's childhood and the London Blitz happened to coincide. Which is great for the movie Hope and Glory, because he turns both events into exquisite myth. Read full review

Hope and Glory has an invitingly nostalgic spirit and a fine eye for the magical details that a little boy might notice. Read full review

Boorman's autobiographical film about family life during the Blitz is subversively light on the blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice, and a joy throughout. Read full review

The movie is wonderfully free of bellyaching; it's a large-scale comic vision, with 90-foot barrage balloons as part of the party atmosphere.

In his brilliantly evocative and warmly comic Hope and Glory, John Boorman shifts the point of view downward, away from the tense and preoccupied adults, to that of a sweetly thoughtful 7-year-old boy, to whom the war is something else entirely. [30 Oct 1987, p.1]

Unlikely as it seems, considering the source, Hope and Glory may be John Boorman's most affecting film. It is surely his most entertaining. [27 Nov 1987, p.D1]

Essentially a collection of sweetly autobiographical anecdotes of English family life during World War II. Read full review

Turning the pious cliches of World War II melodrama on their heads, Boorman has made his most dizzyingly funny movie, an anarchic celebration of family. The warmth that exudes from these turbulent recollections isn't a sentimental heat but a joyful one: Boorman's eyes see the foibles and betrayals of adult life, the casual savagery of children, and forgive all. It's an idyll set amidst urban rubble. [19 Oct 1987, p.84]

There is something almost perverse in the way Boorman defines his point of view. He is not concerned in this film about the tragedy of war, or the meaning of war, but only with the specific experience of war for a grade-school boy. Drawing from his autobiographical memories, he has not given the little boy in the movie any more insights than such a little boy should have. Read full review

At the same time that Boorman seduces us with such enchantments, he also deceives us with a crafty little googly of his own--persuading us that he is embarking on a fresh adventure while aiming straight for the heart of old-fashioned English cinema. Read full review

Appealing, emotional and with a strong enough performance by Rice-Edwards as the boy in his own little war-free world. Read full review

It's unfortunate a picture as lovingly envisioned and beautifully rendered as Hope and Glory has to struggle to find a resolution. [25 Dec 1987, p.7]