The Red Riding Trilogy

The past never lets go.

Comprised of three films, with characters weaving in and out across a five-hour running time, this extremely-ambitious crime story cuts to the quick.

The chapters are known separately as Red Riding 1974, Red Riding 1980, and Red Riding 1983, and you absolutely want to watch them in order.

Filmed by different directors, but all springing from novels by English writer David Peace, they unspool a haunting story of missing and murdered children, blackmail, corruption, and small communities rotting away from the inside.

Small grace notes of hope battle with the bleakness of reality, in a truly-stunning accomplishment.

Under the Silver Lake

You can smell the paranoia from here.

Or maybe it’s just BO.

Either way, Andrew Garfield’s grungy accidental private eye carves a lonely path through ooky-kooky L.A., hunting for a missing woman who may not be really missing, his brain a mess of wild theories.

Meanwhile someone is killing dogs, the Homeless King rules from the shadows, and “Jesus and the Brides of Dracula” perform every night at a house party near you.

Little of it makes any sense – which is kinda, sorta the point – but it makes for a great ride on a mental rollercoaster headed for Crazy Town.