Bloody Sunday: Critic Reviews

It re-creates a moral earthquake; it captures how the eruptive texture of that day was the product of forces that had been brewing for decades.

The level of accomplishment in the filmmaking is overwhelming, because in addition to the flash-cut boldness, it's an earthy epic like Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers.

Forget about the controversy: this is visceral, rocket-fuelled film-making.

As a terrifying example of what can happen when too many angry people are crowded into too small a space, it's a gripper.

A movie to remember.

You're not merely watching history, you're engulfed by it.

A startlingly immediate re-creation of the January 1972 Derry massacre.

The handheld camerawork and bleached-out color palette suggest something more akin to combat footage, and candid moments recorded on the sly give Bloody Sunday a chilling realism.

Bloody Sunday not only is a classic study in the way things can go devastatingly, violently wrong, but also a lesson in the importance of not letting that happen.

The primitive force of this film seems to bubble up from the vast collective memory of the combatants. It's like watching a nightmare made flesh.

As an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of immediate and present reality permeates every scene.

Rarely do gunshots elicit such shock. Rarely does violence feel so horrific.

Greengrass sacrifices character and plot to a chilling impressionistic stylization.

A bracing, unblinking work that serves as a painful elegy and sobering cautionary tale.

Would that Greengrass had gone a tad less for grit and a lot more for intelligibility.

Little more than a well-mounted history lesson.

Stunning.

An astonishing re-creation of the Londonderry massacre of January 1972.

It's not just one of the best but also one of the most important films of the year.

Greengrass (working from Don Mullan's script) forgoes the larger socio-political picture of the situation in Northern Ireland in favour of an approach that throws one in the pulsating thick of a truly frightening situation.

It's an extraordinary adrenaline-pumping immersion into historical events, and goes along way to explain the bitterness that has resounded from that day.

A grim, startling motion picture.

Intelligently crafted and often insightful.

A compelling, gut-clutching piece of advocacy cinema that carries you along in a torrent of emotion as it explores the awful complications of one terrifying day.

Powerful retelling of 1972 demonstrations.