Andrea Arnold made one of the best films of 2007 so far in Red Road and, especially outside of major cities, hardly anyone in the States has heard of it, much less seen it. It won the BAFTA Award (the equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Film and Best Director and it deserved both. In the riveting film, a brilliant Kate Dickie plays a CCTV operator who watches over the city she lives in, monitoring the live camera feeds around the city. One day she sees a man on one of her monitors that she thought she'd never see again and she responds in an unusual way, choosing confrontation over just watching. It's a thriller about dealing with fear and our tragic pasts. It's an almost-perfect film.

Before making her feature debut with Red Road, Andrea Arnold won the Oscar for a 24-minute short film called Wasp that starred Nathalie Press (My Summer of Love) and Danny Dyer (Severance). The entirety of the short film is included on the Red Road DVD and its a stunner. Even if you're not interested in Red Road, rent it just to see Wasp, a perfect nail-biter of a short film.

The fact that there's only one. Red Road is a part of a project spearheaded by Lars Von Trier, where a number of writers will use the same characters in different stories. Some information on the project would have been nice or a commentary on the movie itself.

With stunning performances and a dark realism, Red Road is a must-see and one of the most tragically underseen films of the year. It's sad that we live in a film world where the winner of 5 BAFTAs gets little to no press at all in the States and far-inferior films open on 4,000 screens. Don't let a movie this good slip away.