22 JULY

On 22 July 2011, right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, before heading 40km north-west to a Labour Party Youth Camp on Utøya Island, where he shot dead another 69.

From such horrific events, Paul Greengrass has made a dignified, inspiring film, at once dispassionate and compassionate. Far from focusing on the terror attack (Erik Poppe’s U – July 22 takes that approach, and does so responsibly), Greengrass presents the massacre swiftly and harrowingly, neither sanitising the violence nor resorting to gratuitous bloodshed. He then concentrates on the healing process of one survivor, Viljar Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli), and the trial of Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie).

Such a structure presents the same challenge to Greengrass as that which faced the Norwegian courts – how to allow Breivik the freedom of speech to expound his anti-immigration manifesto without granting him the platform he craved so that others might follow. The answer is to show democracy operating at its finest and to surround Breivik’s gospel of hate with survivor tales of tolerance and optimism.

Though 22 July is engrossing from first frame to last, Greengrass sensibly tames the frantically kinetic visuals that became his trademark in the Bourne movies – better a somewhat mechanical progression through events than a tasteless thriller dynamic. The result is a film that matches Bloody Sunday and United 93 for conscience and impact. Jamie Graham