Watch Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1983 For Free

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Blistering performances.

A binge watching of RED RIDING TRILOGY, three TV movies adapted from David Peace's RED RIDING QUARTET, where its second chapter 1977 is skipped. Directed by three different directors in three different formats: 1974 by Julian Jarrold in 16mm film, 1980 by James Marsh in 35mm film and 1983 by Anand Tucked with Red One digital camera, the trilogy forebodingly trawls into the organized crimes and police corruption in West Yorkshire through the prisms of three different protagonists while they are wrestling with a series of murder cases, and overall, it inspires to achieve a vérité similitude of the bleak milieu while sometimes being mired with its own navel- gazing, such as narrative banality (1974), over-calculated formality (1980) and poorly indicated flashback sequences (1983). Finally in 1983, Detective Inspector Maurice Jobson (Morrissey) , who appears in all three films, holds court in the final one, he is one of the corrupted, but his guilty conscience begins to catch up with him, after a new incident of a missing girl transpires, and he seeks help from a medium Mandy Wymer (Reeves), who evokes his buried memories pertain to his involvement in the investigation in 1974. Simultaneously, a paralleled plot-line introduces a thickset solicitor John Piggott (Addy), the son of a former compromised police officer, visits Michael Myshkin (Mays, a distressingly disturbing scene-stealer, makes great play between prevarication and innocence to the full) in the prison and tries to defend a wronged suspect of the current investigation, Leonard Cole (Kearns), who is Michael's best friend and the son of Reverent Marin Laws (Mullan), but fails due to the atrocious injustice. While, a male prostitute BJ (Sheehan), a pervasive existence in the trilogy, released from the jail and fetches a rifle on his way to vendetta, the three tributaries will converge in the home of Reverent Laws, to bring the seedy crime conspiracy into daylight in the end of the day, yet, the ultimate demise is far from satisfactory, the canker within the institution remains untouched, it is estimable to be so unwavering to expose the ugly truth, but the aftertaste is too disillusioned to purvey a balanced assimilation. Albeit there is no visible sign-posting in its time- frame jumps, which certainly impedes the viewing experience, the third one at least does a fair job to dot the i's and cross the t's. In a nutshell, RED RIDING trilogy is a juggernaut exposé of the society's underside and in retrospect, heralds some more forensic procedural output in UK's televisionary landscape, like THE FALL (2013-to date).

For the previous two films in this trilogy I had my reservations even though I enjoyed the grim tone and the good performances from a host of recognizable faces. I think part of it was that it felt like maybe there wasn't much behind the atmosphere and grim faces but that this delivery worked in its favor? Perhaps but for sure in this final film the content is really rather exposed as not being up to as much as the critical praise would suggest and ultimately we have a rather unsatisfying conclusion which retrospectively hurts the other films as well.Where the films started out with corruption lurking behind murders, they generally were just about kept believable within the real world context that the films tried to retain. In this final one though it really feels like it gets too big and too serious and I found it hard to get into because it all became such a fiction. The plot here jumps back and forth in time but does so without any warning or signal that it will do so, which did throw me for a few seconds as I tried to figure out why characters who had died seemed to be up and about showing no signs of death. This occurs to fill in details and information to help us with the current plot (a lawyer investigates the original swan-wing killing while a policeman reaches the end of his moral tether) however there is a problem with this structure. The problem is that it feels like we were deliberately kept in the dark – I understand some of it is a mystery which is being revealed but it was known from the first film who did the killings and who was involved in the cover-up and why they did it, so the flashback don't "reveal" so much as flesh out and they do it in a way that made me wonder why such scenes were not in it earlier since I was there at the time.These things distracted me from the biggest annoyance which is that this film connects to the first one but has very little with the second film. The reason I rushed into seeing this third one was the basis of the revelations and twists at the end of the second film and it was disappointing to see that basically the second film would easily have been dropped since it doesn't add a great deal in the middle when viewed in context of the complete trilogy. The irony is that the third film is significantly weaker than the second one. The time-jumping is a little off-balancing although it does work in filling in the character of Maurice at least but I really didn't like the use of the medium as a major plot device – it really clashes with the grim realism thing it had been doing and just seems lazy as a piece of writing. The connections all coming together don't satisfy as they should either – again the bigger they get the less they work and the network is too tight to convince.The performances and the grim atmosphere continue to cover for the weaknesses. Addy is good because at least his performance differs from the majority since he is more innocent and wide-eyed than the grim lot. Morrissey plays the other extreme well but mostly it is dead-eyed tiredness that he does, albeit well. Support from Clarke, Carter and others is good but in some cases they have little to work with in their characters (Mullan in particular). It is a shame then, but this film doesn't come together and it is additionally disappointing since this third film needed to bring the other two to a close and make the trilogy strong. It doesn't do this and instead it feels like the material reaches too far and unravels as it approaches an unsatisfyingly convenient and delivered conclusion. I quite enjoyed the previous two films even though I didn't see what all the critics and IMDbers were raving about – in the light of the third I am even more mystified about why this trilogy got such universal adoration.

In two words, brutal and disturbing. But also complex, adult, respecting the viewer who wants more than a linear tale with loose ends all strung up very neatly; its a close-up of a society in decay, of a police force that fails to have a moral compass, of some dark perversions lurking where one least expects to find them. The performances are uniformly excellent, and each of the tales, separated by a few years, showcase a specific individual into whose motivations and feelings we are allowed access: a journalist, a federal investigator, a local policeman. Be warned that there are graphic scenes of torture, that often a clue dropped in Part 1 is not picked up until Part 3, that character motivations, like those of our own, are not always crystal clear. There are 300 minutes of intensity, filmed with immediacy if not always clarity, and worth an immersion for the willing viewer.

The last part of the "Red Riding"-Trilogy (I'm assuming you have seen the other two at least), this concludes the story. The real main player here, was a side player in the previous ones (though he did have more to "say" than we might have guessed in those movies). The second guy who has a main role, is a solicitor. And while he is reluctant at first, he seems to get his head around to become more involved.But again as with the other characters throughout the series, there are no real likable characters at hand here. Someone called this an adult approach to the thriller genre. You have to figure out, how you feel about that, of course. You might find it dreadful. On the other hand, this is a great thriller. It just needs it's time to unfold. And all the loose points get together at last ... Though some might be disappointed at what we get served ... I personally still feel, that the first movie was the strongest.