IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER (1994)

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER (R) A true-life political thriller so passionately charged it can stand with the finest movies of its kind (Z, All the President's Men, A World Apart). Daniel Day-Lewis is Gerry Conlon, the young petty thief from Belfast who happened to be in London in the fall of 1974, when the IRA bombed two Guildford pubs. Along with several other innocents (including his own father), he was tortured into confessing. Gerry, as Day- Lewis plays him (memorably), is a misfit and a screwup, a goofball rebel whom the experience of prison gradually molds into a man. The catalyst of the change is his reconciliation with his father, the dour, sickly Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite). In the end, Gerry triumphs over injustice-but, even more stirringly, over the troubles in his own soul. A- ( 206, Jan. 21) -OG