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BLOODY SUNDAY Send This Review to a Friend
One of the strongest films in the New York Film Festival and now in commercial release, "Bloody Sunday" is a rousing, realistic expose of the brutality with which British forces slaughtered unarmed victims in a peaceful Irish-Catholic parade in 1972 in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
Writer-director Paul Greengrass doesn't pussyfoot. He has made what resembles a documentary, using hand-held cameras in a style that gives us an astonishing you-are-there feeling. It is almost as if we are in the midst of the action in which 13 demonstrators were killed and many more wounded.
The camera technique works best in the street action scenes. It works less well in the intimate personal sequences, but that's a quibble. The overall effect is gripping and shattering. James Nesbitt stars as Ivan Cooper, leader of the march, which has been banned by the British, creating a recipe for violence.
Tim Pigott-Smith plays the British Major General Robert Ford, who assumes the task of enforcing the ban. Cooper does lose control of a group of stone-throwing hotheads, but the British are shown to be gung-ho to inflict damage on the parade, and not only do they engage in a shooting frenzy, but there is cover up to pretend that the troops were fired on first and we see the planting of arms on one victim.
To the credit of Greengrass, he doesn't indulge in a phony attempt at so-called objectivity. "Bloody Sunday" is plainly an indictment and thereby gets its strength. A Paramount Classics release.
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