This past Sunday, I braved the wintry cold to go see THE LIVES OF OTHERS, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s near-masterpiece about artists under surveillance by the Stasi in Communist East Berlin. That morning, before I saw the film, I found myself sending an email to friends, imploring them to go see Andrea Arnold’s thriller RED ROAD, which I had the opportunity to see at Sundance in January. In Arnold’s film, a woman who works for a security film monitoring various locations around Glasgow via closed circuit cameras (The U.K. has more closed circuit cameras per capita than anywhere in the world!), becomes obsessed with tracking one grainy figure (presumably from her past). This idea of obsessive monitoring of another’s patterns and behavior, whether it be for personal reasons or the perceived security of the state, makes for some consistently riveting cinema, and of course, is extremely relevant in a post-9/11 age of compromised civil liberties, as well as the Internet. The idea of being watched without knowledge makes for a rich and diverse cinematic canvas. Most recently, Michael Haneke used this in CACHE to stunning effect; implicating the viewer into the position of the spy and making us uncomfortable with the role of the passive spectator. One of my other favorites films, Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (to which THE LIVES OF OTHERS has been compared), was also about surveillance and the role of the watcher, as well as what is at stake and making sure what one has seen is accurately analyzed.