...an overlong yet consistently engaging drama that benefits from its inherently compelling subject matter and raft of top-notch performances...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 5, 2025

In The Name Of The Father is a gritty, compelling and engrossing film. Day-Lewis is extraordinary, of course.

| Jun 3, 2022

Jim Sheridan tells his gripping tale with a fury that stokes up an audience the way early Costa Gavras movies used to do.

| Feb 15, 2018

Daniel Day-Lewis is remarkable.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 28, 2014

In the Name of the Father is a model of this kind of engaged, enraged filmmaking, a politically charged Fugitive that uses one of the most celebrated cases of recent British history to steamroller an audience with the power of rousing, polemical cinema.

| Feb 28, 2014

At every point, Day-Lewis is at the center of the story, and he carries the film with an impassioned performance. It helps that it's a great part.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 28, 2014

The picture turns into a kind of stylized morality play about the right and the wrong ways for Irishmen to respond to distorted portraits of their character, and it's terrifically effective.

| Feb 28, 2014

In the Name of the Father is a deeply stirring film that lessens the moral authority of the I.R.A., English soldiers in Ireland, the British police and the British government.

| Feb 28, 2014

Day-Lewis, so intricately repressed in The Age of Innocence, here offers a role reversal in an unreserved and emotional performance that throws caution and inhibition to the winds.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 28, 2014

If Sheridan didn't feel the need to pile on the pedantic subtexts, this would be an absorbing personal drama, rather than a vituperative, question-begging broadside.

| Feb 28, 2014

The complicated relationship between the rebellious Gerry and the quietly tormented Giuseppe is one focus of the film. The obvious political implications of the dreadful situation are another.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 28, 2014

This is a stirring and exceptionally well acted, though controversial, dramatisation of Gerry Conlon's book about the grave miscarriage of justice suffered by the Guildford Four.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 28, 2014

Day-Lewis outdoes his acclaimed performance in My Left Foot, making Gerry a character of palpable realness and complexity.

| Feb 28, 2014

In this powerful, Oscar-nominated movie, Jim Sheridan infuses a fact-based social injustice drama with a more intimate family tale of estranged father and son, splendidly played by Daniel Day-Lewis and Peter Postlethwaite.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 25, 2009

By the end of the movie, whether or not you're a member of Sinn Fein, the Brits' brutality toward the Conlons will get your Irish up.

| Mar 11, 2008

[Sheridan] works with such piercing fervor and intelligence that In the Name of the Father just about transcends its tidy moral design.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 11, 2008

Sheridan takes a controversial subject and gives it wider appeal by focusing on the family drama of two men who are also political prisoners.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 11, 2008

Miscarried justice often provides the vehicle for emotionally wrenching drama and histrionic fireworks, and such is the case in spades with In the Name of the Father.

Full Review | Mar 11, 2008

Letter-perfect performances from Day-Lewis and Postlethwaite do a lot more than a dozen editorials to make an unforgettable point about the miscarriage of justice.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 11, 2008

Director Sheridan chronicles the father-son relationship perfectly and also handles the courtroom confrontations skilfully without ever falling into movie melodramatics.

| Mar 11, 2008