If there's a Gaelic translation of "forgive and forget," you won't hear it from Joe Griffen. Joe was a lad in a Catholic enclave of Northern Ireland when he saw his brother gunned down by a Protestant gangster. Decades later, the only way that Joe (James Nesbitt) will extend a hand to the killer (Liam Neeson) is with a weapon.

The vengeance tale "Five Minutes of Heaven" is cunningly cinematic. Because the meeting between Joe and the paroled Alistair is arranged for a TV news program, it has the sheen of the surreal, like "Frost/Nixon" with switchblades.

But what makes the story resonate is the different song that's sung by the one-time antagonist. During his years in prison, Alistair grew so remorseful that he now promotes healing in conflict zones around the world. Today, it's his turn to face a victim, an angry man for whom "truth and reconciliation" are buzzword Band-Aids.

Neeson, as usual, is a dignified and even haunting presence. But Nesbitt steals the movie from him with a hair-trigger performance. In a limousine en route to the taping, in the makeup chair backstage and in a last-second smoke break with a sympathetic production assistant (Anamaria Marinca), he sputters like a teapot while calculating his angles like a gunfighter.

German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who envisioned Hitler's bunker in "Downfall," wrings the maximum tension from the ticking clock and from the absurd intrusions of the mundane. The film's sound design is especially effective, from the rattle of toys in the bag where young Alistair hides his pistol to the bray of a walkie talkie as nervous Joe prepares to enter the interview room.

And Hirschbiegel's art department has a keen understanding of sectarian space in a disputed territory where graffiti and flags function like barbed-wire barricades.

A director whose breakthrough was the story of a madman's last stand has exceeded that feat with the story of an angry man's next step.