"Paul Greengrass's vivid, devastating film captures the dread, horror, and confusion of January 30, 1972, in Bogside, the Northern Ireland district where British soldiers fired on Irish activists during a civil rights march, killing 13 and wounding more. Adapting Don Mullan's oral history of the tragedy, Greengrass sacrifices character and plot to a chilling impressionistic stylization. Shot by the excellent Ivan Strasburg, the entire film is photographed with handheld cameras that hover and swoop, producing a breathtaking immediacy. The director dispenses with transitions, punctuating terse, charged scenes of political organizers, soldiers at the army command center, and British officers by fading to black--a form of ellipsis that establishes a convincing political, cultural, and social framework for the events, the officers' class-conscious arrogance, the soldiers' sense of power, and the Irish activists' feelings of loss, anger, and political impotence. The movie's searing conclusion left me numb and overwhelmed. With James Nesbitt. 107 min. (Patrick Z. McGavin)"