Metacritic reviews

For in relating the true story of Conlon's wrongful conviction and 15-year imprisonment, Sheridan has used the tools of the filmmaker to evoke a visceral echo of Conlon's waking nightmare.

Jim Sheridan skillfully interweaves a myriad of subplots and themes into a fast-paced, cohesive whole.

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

And, riskiest of all, the film makers eschewed another grainy documentary go at the subject in favor of a movie drama of one of the most compelling true stories of the modern troubles.

In the Name of the Father is as good a compromise of fact and fiction as you could hope for -- and still call it a movie.

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.

But the acting's so good it frequently transcends the simplicities of the script, and whenever Day-Lewis or Postlethwaite is on-screen the movie crackles.

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.

The movie does a harrowing job of showing how, and why, a man might be made to confess to a bombing he didn't commit.

He gets much of what he wants, but not all of it, and not all of the time - the film is just too eclectic on occasion, a bit jumpy in its tone and its pacing.