| 100 |
Entertainment Weekly
It's a mad cycle of arrogance and despair, and Bloody Sunday etches it onto your nervous system.
|
| 100 |
Newsweek
Brings history to life with an uncanny sense of realism.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
By re-imagining a pivotal, terrible 24 hours, Greengrass has made a must-see film that is timely - and timeless.
|
| 100 |
The New Yorker
For the viewer, the miracle of Bloody Sunday is that firm moral judgment can exist side by side with a wild and bitter exhilaration in the sheer physicality of violence. [7 Oct 2002, p. 108]
|
| 100 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A bracing, unblinking work that serves as a painful elegy and sobering cautionary tale.
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A great achievement: tense and passionate, a film that one feels not just emotionally but also physically.
|
| 100 |
Washington Post
An extraordinary film ... that's impossible to dismiss or leave unmoved.
|
| 100 |
Variety
A stunning work, revisiting controversial events with journalistic objectivity and a meticulous eye for detail.
|
| 100 |
New York Magazine
The most visceral and cumulatively powerful account of civil war since Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers."
|
| 91 |
Portland Oregonian
It's raw, visceral stuff that precious few movies are capable of equaling.
|
| 90 |
Chicago Reader
Patrick Z. McGavin
The movie's searing conclusion left me numb and overwhelmed.
|
| 90 |
Dallas Observer
Amazingly, almost every note of every performance in Bloody Sunday rings true.
|
| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
Once positions hardened, tragedy was all but inevitable, and Bloody Sunday" does the spirit of that awful day full and unforgettable justice.
|
| 90 |
Village Voice
Bloody Sunday doesn't surrender its grip on the viewer even after the action shifts from the streets of Bogside to a local hospital where the weeping masses are still under the guns of the war-painted British soldiers.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
The level of accomplishment in the filmmaking is overwhelming.
|
| 90 |
LA Weekly
A scrupulously even-handed account, free of ideological or tribal partisanship, based on eyewitness accounts by survivors and the anonymous "Paras" themselves.
|
| 89 |
Austin Chronicle
A triumph in anguish.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
One view of what happened that day, a very effective one. And as an act of filmmaking, it is superb: A sense of immediate and present reality permeates every scene.
|
| 88 |
New York Daily News
Surges forward with barely a respite. It's like watching a propane factory burn, waiting for the tanks inside to explode, and when they do, we're right in the middle of it.
|
| 88 |
Boston Globe
The film is conducted in a delirious cinema-verite style; most of what you see has a brutal, you-are-there immediacy. You're not merely watching history, you're engulfed by it.
|
| 88 |
New York Post
An astonishing re-creation of the Londonderry massacre of January 1972.
|
| 88 |
Baltimore Sun
Greengrass and his tremendously smart and emotionally agile lead actor, James Nesbitt, paint their portrait of a good politician without illusion or sentimentality.
|
| 83 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
There's no denying the skill and flair with which director Paul Greengrass has restaged this unhappy event, creating an uncanny sense of immediacy and allowing us to be a fly on the wall at a seminal '70s tragedy.
|
| 80 |
Film Threat
A gripping experience, and often downright sickening.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
As a terrifying example of what can happen when too many angry people are crowded into too small a space, it's a gripper.
|
| 80 |
Wall Street Journal
A harrowing lesson in unintended -- and intended -- consequences.
|
| 80 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
At its best, Bloody Sunday produces the same chilling illusion of history writ large, clearly detailing the strategies of both sides, then blankly observing the conflict through unadorned, newsreel camera stock and the precise orchestration of large-scale chaos.
|
| 75 |
ReelViews
The result is a grim, startling motion picture.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
An impressive film accomplishment, a combination of technique and extremely specific detail that reminds viewers how potent a rhetorical force the medium can be.
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
What Bloody Sunday lacks in clarity, it makes up for with a great, fiery passion.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
The accents are thick and the soundtrack noisy, but even as the screen explodes in chaos, Greenglass maintains a solid grip on the story.
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