Popular reviews

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸 ★★★★½ 8

  In less assured hands, Red Road could easily have been a shamelessly manipulative and grotty little potboiler.

  Those hands would not have needed to have been that much less assured than Andrea Arnold's either. This stunning mystery drama, set around the titular (now former) high-rise estate in one of the poorest areas in Glasgow, could so easily on so many occasions go off the rails and become something that would have been considerably less rewarding and considerably more depressing.

  Guided by a startling and starkly realistic lead performance from Kate Dickie, this is a film that starts out as a surveillance video suspense thriller before becoming a very affecting domestic drama film. It plays its hand absolutely expertly as well…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 21

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  CW: rape culture

  Don't watch this movie.

  First of all, I am not tagging this for spoilers because I'd rather you read this and not see this movie than avoid reading this because you don't want to be spoiled: fuck this movie. Fuck any movie that uses a false rape allegation as a plot point. The over-prevalence of these stories in media feeds the continual victim-blaming, slut-shaming patriarchal rape denialism that lets most rapists go free. I'm not saying you're gonna watch this and suddenly decide to stop believing rape survivors or go sit a jury and say "oh he's such a nice boy." I'm not talking about you; I'm talking about what happens when you then go promote this…

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  Review by Mario Melendez ★★★ 1

  I must say that I was not entirely convinced or with the best dispositions on my part to see director Andrea Arnold's debut, in the end, I have done so for two simple reasons:

  1. because a dear friend from Argentina recommended it in a Discord group.
  2. I wanted to get rid of the bitter taste I had from having seen Fish Tank last year.

  In this author's work we meet Jackie, a girl who lives alone, works at the Glasgow City Hall. Her job is to watch the images from the surveillance cameras strategically distributed around the city for security reasons. One day, she gets a big surprise when she sees on one of the monitors a man…

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  Review by Josh Gillam ★★★½

  Andrea Arnold’s debut is a palpably unsettling, provocative chamber piece, one interested in using the base elements of a thriller and reconfiguring them into something much more unconventional.

  The filmmaker is skilful in pushing on the limits of identification, placing us with Jackie (Kate Dickie) as her almost voyeuristic obsession starts to take hold. The story does an excellent job of probing this troubled mind, Arnold matching that state with her brilliantly inventive style—a mix of social realism and poetic hyperstylation, putting us into Jackie’s headspace as we’re thrown into the middle of this situation.

  It’s the sort of film that really gets under your skin, keeping us in the dark for most of the runtime so that we share…

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  Review by Branson Reese

  The idea of a person with their own hopes and dreams and tragedies being on the other end of a CCTV is one that has long fascinated me.

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  Review by ♠ Benja ♠ ★★★★

  Much like the voyeur experience, "Red Road" marks a distressfully invading yet severely irresistible debut from Andrea Arnold, one that brilliantly involves the viewer in the landscape and provides very sparse details, relying only upon what meets the eye and assumption until the disquieting reveal.

  Voyeuring the voyeur within the Dogme 95 metrics only adds to the sense of realism and grounds the suspense and some of the more implausible aspects.

  Solid civic surveillance thriller that takes full advantage of the Danish connection.

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ Liam ˊˎ˗ ★★★★★

  OF COURSE ANDREA ARNOLD’S FIRST FILM IS THIS GOOD OF COURSE IT IS!!!!!! honestly didn’t really know what to expect but wow this got me real good

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  Review by Sethsreviews ★★★★ 2

  A fascinating exploration on grief, and how it can weigh on us. Kate Dickie and Tony Curran both give memorable and authentic performances. Recommend this highly!

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  Review by chavel ★★★ 3

  No flashbacks are ever provided in Andrea Arnold’s debut (“Fish Tank,” “American Honey” are remarkable works of hers that followed). Kate Dickie plays introverted Jackie, a government surveillance operator for the Glasgow slums in Red Road, monitoring dozens of video circuits and reporting any suspicious activity to authorities as they come up. There can be calls on harassment of girls, hit-and-run thefts, or stabbings. One night Jackie notices a man whom we can interpret had a negative impact on her past, and appears to be a resident of a tenement that houses reformed ex-cons. Jackie looks as if she will track him to see if he slips up because the slightest violation of his parole will send him back to…

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  Review by Mos Co ★★★½ 1

  Nobody does bad sex like Andrea Arnold.

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  Review by williamfaeleith ★★★★½ 3

  Andrea Arnold's debut feature was filmed, using Dogme 95 style rules, in and around Glasgow. Mostly around the Red Road high-rise flats which were the tallest residential buildings in Europe at the time they were built, but were demolished in 2015 when the cost of repairs/maintenance became more than their rental income. Their brutalist modernist architectural style mirrors Arnold's film-making style here.
  Jackie is a conscientious CCTV security operator with an unhappy, lonely life. One day she sees a man from her past on one of her screens, that she was not expecting to see. She uses her position to monitor his movements so she can find out all about him and engineer a way to meet him, even though…

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  Review by reibureibu

  Red Road doesn't quite take place in the post-Internet era where anything and everything has become a piece of information to be cataloged and collected by big data, but it does eerily presage that with its constantly-observing CCTV cameras that silently-hover over the British residents who live under its watchful gaze.

  Jackie Morrison is the woman behind the screen who observes all those caught on camera, or at least in the immediate vicinity she works in. Her job is to monitor it all and report any suspicious behavior, though in reality she ends up simply observing habitual activities: a man who walks his dog every day, kids hanging out around the block, and a janitor cleaning a building every night.…