everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This low-budget Scottish indie is worth looking up. It moves quickly, with engagement and suspense, and gives us some things to think about in the age of Edward Snowden and omnipresent surveillance cams.The backstory isn't laid out for us at first. We quickly learn that Jackie's husband and child are dead, but not how; she is joylessly hooking up with a married co-worker in his car. Her life is focused on the people she observes through her law enforcement job: she operates a bank of urban CCTV security cameras trained on streets, shops, back lots, and apartment blocks, watching a gritty part of town for crime in real time. They remind me of the set of "Rear Window". She can move the cameras, look at windows or doorways, zoom in, follow someone from place to place. She watches the little dramas of their actual lives.Then, monitoring an encounter in a back lot to see if it is a rape in progress or a trick being turned, she recognizes a man. His name is Clyde. She had thought he was in jail ... we aren't told for what ... but she is told he has gotten out early for good behavior. It shakes her. He lives in the area she can observe, in the Red Road block, a grim high-rise full of people living on the edge. He hangs out in the local pub; he drives a locksmith's van. She watches him. She feels the need to do something. She tracks him, and his associates, first by camera - then in person, into his habitat.It's not clear what she intends. The suspense as she pursues whatever plan she has, if there is a plan and not just impulse, goes close to the edge of what is bearable. We don't know what she is risking. We don't know what sort of man he is. Is he an evil man, who deserves whatever happens to him? Is he planning more crimes, and is she protecting society from him? Is he a decent man, persecuted by a rogue police agent? Is it all more complex? At a certain point there are signs that she may be attracted to him, or is that just adrenaline? Or pretense? Or a response to her shell of isolation and routines falling apart?The film keeps us guessing and mostly avoids thriller clichés, arriving at a resolution that is maybe slightly tinny but mostly satisfying. It's worth some effort to dig this up.

Scotland sure ain't Hollywood. Nothing in Andrea Arnold's Scotland breaks up the unremitting bleakness, the overcast coldness hovers above huge decaying housing blocks inhabited by criminals and miscreants of every sort. Kate Dickie's "Jackie" spends her days watching the ugliness and criminality from her job as a video patrolwoman. This exceedingly slow-moving movie drives forward glacially based on Jackie's rather peculiar effort at exacting revenge against the ex-con that accidentally took out her husband and daughter. Along the way to punishing the transgression she loses her way when she finds her feeling getting jumbled with curiosity and lust. If you can slog through the nearly 2 hour run time and its unleavened bleakness, the story eventually becomes compelling although Jackie nor any of the other characters do. However, making it to the interesting bits requires a willful effort to hold attention on the film as it doesn't do that for you. In short, if you seek to have a bad time at the movies, this is a good film for you.

There's a gritty honesty to this film that you don't see very often. Though the script is very spare, and not a lot of information is given to the audience, there is just enough to keep you engaged and wondering what will happen next. And by the end, it all adds up to a satisfying conclusion. It is not exactly a suspense film that will have you on the edge of your seat throughout, but more an interesting study of one woman's obsession and barely controlled grief. You continue to wonder why she is doing what she is doing. There is nary a false moment and not one that will make you groan due to an improbable plot turn, which is the problem with so many thrillers, and films in general these days.Kate Dickie gives an excellent, low-key performance as a private security guard that watches over a panel of monitors linked to cameras placed all throughout Glasgow, Scotland. One day, she sees someone from her past who she did not expect to see, and the story is off and running, or at least trotting. Very well done and well- executed, focusing on a working-class setting we don't see handled well very often.

Jackie works at a city surveillance service in Glasgow. One night she see on one of the monitors a face from her past, a man just released from prison. This causes a major disruption in her bleak and hollow life. We know it has to do with something ugly and painful that happened long ago, and we fear for Jackie, as she starts taking more and more risks in an effort to get closer to that person.I saw this movie at my local videostore. A few months ago I saw and liked Fish Tank, the latest feature film by director Andrea Arnold, so I decided to give it a go. I was not disappointed. The acting was strong, and the story-telling gripping and thought-provoking.I find a similar feel in both movies, stories with female protagonists who cope with hurt and glum outlooks. Jackie is a much more extreme character than the girl in Fish Tank, but I'm pleased to find the same warmth and compassion underneath that hard shell.The world is such a scary place these days that cynicism and hopelessness feel like the easy way out in too many stories. It is refreshing to find narratives were hope is allowed to have the last word.