The greatest movie ever!

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The opening scene where the explosive is being mixed and the car number plates are switched was like looking through the bombers' eyes. Seeing a maroon Vauxhall Cavalier parked on the street, and hearing kids talking Spanish was like watching it happen again. That's what realism in film is about.Of course this wouldn't have been shown in US movie theatres because it doesn't portray the IRA as swashbuckling heroes like "The Devil's Own" did, although "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" does that, and probably won't get shown either. I can't understand why anyone would need to have background information to the conflict in Northern Ireland as explanation- was Bloody Sunday justification for it? Judging by the number of Catholics killed and maimed in Omagh that day, I don't think so.

I do not believe I have ever seen a movie that more truthfully and compellingly captures tragedy than Pete Travis's Omagh.Omagh tells the story of the 1998 Real IRA bombing that killed 29 people in the city of Omagh, Northern Ireland, and the aftermath that followed. Yet what endears me to this film is that this could have been any town, any family, any tragedy. The film is completely without frills. It is one of the few films I've seen that does not romanticize death and tragedy. It has no towering musical score telling your emotions where to go (there is no score at all, actually), no dramatic final words, no sanguine epitaphs. Instead, Travis shows us what the camera usually leaves out -- the dirty dishes after the funeral party has left your house, the ubiquitous reporters asking for pictures of the deceased, the kind but nuisance of a neighbor offering help when you just want to be left alone.The technical aspects of the film were all very well done, as were the actors' performances. Everything about the film makes you feel as though you are looking through a window into what really happened at Omagh, rather than watching an screen adaptation of the events. Omagh is well worth a see.

OMAGH tells the story of a terrorist bombing in a northern Ireland hamlet that killed 29 people in the mid 90s. It follows a father and several others who try over the next several years to get justice for their murdered kin. The movie ends on an ambivalent note, as it was based on a true story. No one is ever held responsible for the bombing, although several terrorists that may have been involved are eventually incarcerated for other misdeeds. The movie is filmed and told in documentary fashion, using a jittery, swooping hand-held camera, and it works most of the time. The film is actually very subdued, very low key, and in the end this lack of heightened histrionics tends to work against it. We are happy when it is finally over, especially as we are led to understand halfway through that the bombers will never be caught or prosecuted. Brenda Fricker has a cameo as an ombudsman. Otherwise, the rather large cast, presumably including some real villagers, is unknown to American audiences.

The most salient fact about this TV movie is that its two hours' running time includes 65 speaking parts. Torn between focusing on one or two human stories behind Northern Ireland's worst terrorist outrage and giving a panorama of the politics that led to it, the production settles for wheeling on almost every Ulster character actor you ever saw and others besides. Even an Oscar winner, Brenda Fricker, is in there somewhere, so she is: blink and you'll miss her. This jittery kaleidoscope creates confusion and dissipates sympathy; as soon as we begin to dig into one victim's backstory, we're off at another tangent. Neither good art nor good commerce, such worthy exercises in the reconstruction of recent events fall between the stools of documentary and drama. Like many, "Omagh" is shot in "swivelvision" in the common but quite mistaken belief that this makes it look more "real"-- as though documentarists had never learned to use Steadicam. It tiptoes delicately through the minefield of libel that bedevils moveimakers trying to portray unresolved situations: a title at the end tells us that the suspected bombers all deny involvement, so there is no catharsis to be obtained by showing them going to jail. Making us feel sorry for the bereaved is easy meat; but like many an American "issue" movie, all this one will generate in viewers outside Northern Ireland is smug relief at being hors de combat.