Metacritic reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.