News

In the industry’s long, curious history of “twin films” — near-simultaneous productions made, quite coincidentally, on the same subject or from the same material — there have been few bleaker subjects for accidental double-feature treatment than Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, and his two-part massacre of 77 civilians on July 22, 2011. But these are somber times we’re living in, and so it is that months after the premiere of Erik Poppe’s “U – July 22,” a formidably grueling reenactment of Breivik’s bloody attack on the Utøya youth summer camp, British action-vérité specialist Paul Greengrass has followed with “22 July,” a more expansive procedural examination of the atrocity, the ensuing justice process and its weighty effect on Norway’s national psychology. It’s intelligently stern, storm-gray filmmaking, as we’ve come to expect from Greengrass; if it feels a bit mechanical as well, perhaps this is a near-impossible story to film with both tact and soul.