Three Colors: Red | Telescope Film
Three Colors: Red

Three Colors: Red (Trois couleurs : Rouge)

Critic Rating

(read reviews)

User Rating

Part-time model Valentine meets a retired judge who lives in her neighborhood after she runs over his dog. When she returns with the dog to the judge's house, she discovers him listening to his neighbors' phone conversations. At first Valentine is outraged, but her debates with the judge over his behavior lead them to form a strange bond.

Stream Three Colors: Red

What are critics saying?

100

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

With music by Zbigniew Preisner, it is an almost supernatural contrivance: brooding on coincidence, fate and the insoluble mystery of other people’s lives, with some cosmic parallels and existential echoes that recall his earlier film The Double Life of Véronique. And all in a tone somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness.

100

Austin Chronicle

The film courses with vitality -- and makes you glad to be alive. Kieslowski's deft touch gives Red its real magic; in the end, the subtle nuances are what stay with you.

100

Variety by Lisa Nesselson

Red, the beautifully spun and splendidly acted tale of a young model’s decisive encounter with a retired judge, is another deft, deeply affecting variation on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s recurring theme that people are interconnected in ways they can barely fathom. If it’s true — as the helmer has announced — that this opus will be his last foray into film directing, Kieslowski retires at a formal and philosophical peak.

100

Washington Post by Desson Thomson

In this final installment of a glorious trilogy (which includes the films “Blue” and “White”) he has saved his greatest for last.

100

San Francisco Chronicle by Edward Guthmann

Red is the best of the lot: warmer, more accessible, unusually generous toward its characters. A mystical tale of chance encounters and unexpected connections, Red uses a traffic accident as a springboard to discovery.

100

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Red, the final chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, is a subtle masterpiece. With its satisfying exploration of such complex and diverse themes as destiny and platonic love, Red is not only a self-contained motion picture, but a fitting conclusion to the series.

100

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

Red succeeds so stirringly that it also bestows some much-needed magic upon its predecessors, "Blue" and "White." The first film's chic emptiness and the second's relative drabness are suddenly made much rosier by the seductive glow of Red.

100

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be.

100

Austin Chronicle by Jeff McCord

The film courses with vitality -- and makes you glad to be alive. Kieslowski's deft touch gives Red its real magic; in the end, the subtle nuances are what stay with you.

100

CineVue by Patrick Gamble

Three Colours: Red is the trilogy’s anti-romance, depicting an unconventional love story blossoming against the insurmountable obstacle of age – perhaps the most adventurous and personal of the trilogy,

80

Empire

Exquisitely shot, superbly acted and deftly written, this is easily one of the best arthouse films of the nineties.

80

The Guardian

It is a film of much humanity and very far from smart European pap. But the external brilliance of its making does at times subvert its inner workings, as if its manufacture and its meaning were not quite in perfect harmony.

80

Empire by Steve Beard

Exquisitely shot, superbly acted and deftly written, this is easily one of the best arthouse films of the nineties.