Ray Pride

Andrea Arnold's beautifully crafted first feature, "Red Road," following three shorts, including the Oscar-winning "Wasp" (2003), was shot on digital video and exploits a fresh, bold palette in her story of Jackie, an alienated Glasgow policewoman (Kate Dickie) whose job is to watch Glasgow's banks of surveillance monitors. One day, she notices something more unusual than the petty street crimes she surveys each day: a man crosses a street, crosses from one monitor to another, and becoming fixed on him, Jackie crosses a line, and her obsession reaches to following him on the streets, toward the dangerous housing project called Red Road. Why is she obsessed with this figure she first glimpsed as a shadow, almost a ghost on her vast wall of surveillance monitors? The very contemporary paranoia and potential for violence, sexual and otherwise, that simmers throughout Arnold's taut, tense and starkly beautifully film (and Dickie's intent, sere performance as the troubled, vengeful woman) is nightmarish yet haunting. The film is the first of three from The Advance Party, an enterprise co-produced by Glasgow's Sigma Films and Lars von Trier's Zentropa, in which writer-directors are supplied an outline for a film which features the nine actors playing the same characters in all three. There are instructions and rules, a la Dogme 95, but "Red Road" is so much more than a stunt. 113m.

"Red Road" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2007-05-01)

Also by Ray Pride

Love, Truly Love
When I first heard of "The Year of Magical Thinking," the story of her grief and disorientation after the death of John Gregory Dunne, her husband and collaborator of almost forty years, alongside the serious illness of daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, I wanted very much to read what she had wrought of the most intimate of material, even more impressed on learning that Quintana had died in the months since the book had been composed
(2007-04-27)

Monsieur Pignon, I Presume
Veber's put-upon Everyman leads are usually named "François Pignon," now played in "The Valet" (Le doublure) by a third actor (after Jacques Brel and Gerard Depardieu), the baleful, large-eyed Gad Elmaleh
(2007-04-24)

Tip of the Week
Renegade microcinemaphiles The Ice Capades began their "First Annual Battle of the Cities Film Festival" last Wednesday with a showdown between Chicago and East Vancouver. TFABOTCFF continues this week, with programs of about fifty minutes each that the respective city's representatives think best represents their city's DIY output
(2007-04-24)

Bow Wow Wow
A portrait of mental illness brought to the fore by the death of a dying lump of a dog named "Pencil," "Year of the Dog" stars Molly Shannon as Peggy, a drear crackpot, a bore with no life beyond office job and needy hound, a life spent between grande Starbucks
(2007-04-17)

Tip of the Week
(2007-04-17)

When Trash Fails
(2007-04-10)

Tip of the Week
(2007-04-10)

The Other Side of the Mountain
(2007-04-03)

Tip of the Week
(2007-04-03)

Blair Witch Hunt
(2007-03-27)

Tip of the Week
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The Mourning After
(2007-03-20)

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