Andrea Arnold is still a little jet-lagged. Meeting me at Indie Food & Wine, the restaurant inside Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunim Munroe Film Center, the Oscar-winning director of the short film Wasp, and the acclaimed features Red Road, Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, has barely settled after flying into New York a day earlier. It’s four days before the start of the 51st New York Film Festival, and Arnold hasn’t even gotten a chance to look over the main slate. “All I’ve done is put a lot of food in my freezer,” the English filmmaker says. Arnold has good […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Oct 2, 2013Occasionally a period piece comes along that feels neither like the gauzy, ignorantly rendered, idealized versions of the past churned out by the Hollywood of yesteryear nor like the product of our grim, cynical and corporatist postmodern times, the maddening ideological manifestations of which are usually filtered through the perspective of some stooge director. I’m about to tell you about one such film. As stark and unforgiving as her previous works, Andrea Arnold’s new film finds her pondering the aftermath of a mysterious, multi-pronged trauma for yet another soulful, alienated loner. That this shatteringly potent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s too-often-filmed […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 4, 2012Andrea Arnold’s beautifully crafted first feature, Red Road, the follow-up to her Oscar-winning short film, Wasp, was shot on digital video and exploits a fresh, bold palette in telling the story of Jackie (Kate Dickie), an alienated Glasgow policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow’s banks on surveillance monitors. One day, she notices a man behaving unusually and, becoming fixated on him, crosses a line. Stepping out from behind her monitors, she follows him towards the dangerous housing project called Red Road… Why is she so obsessed with this figure, a man she first glimpses as a shadow, almost a […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 12, 2007