A strikingly assured debut performance from child actor Elliott Heffernan anchors Steve McQueen’s latest film. Heffernan plays George, nine-year-old son of a white British mother and a Grenadian father, journeying through the Blitz-ravaged London of 1940. Eleven in real life, Heffernan is a real find, a solemn and level-eyed performer who invests our diminutive hero with pluck, hurt and a boyish zest for life.
Like many of the Oscar-winning writer-director’s earlier works, Blitz is a series of beautifully composed episodes, methodical rather than pacy. Loving detail has gone into evoking the clothes and trappings of the period, shops and underground stations, munitions factories and pubs as well as smashed and burning residential streets.
