Red Riding: 1980

Red Riding: 1980 is the middle film in Channel 4's adaptation of David Peace's Yorkshire crime cycle, broadcast in March 2009 between 1974 and 1983. The director is James Marsh, who had won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature only a fortnight earlier for Man on Wire. The screenplay is by Tony Grisoni, the longtime Terry Gilliam collaborator who adapted all three Peace novels for the trilogy.

Paddy Considine plays the lead role of Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter; the supporting cast includes Maxine Peake, Warren Clarke, James Fox, Tony Pitts and Sean Harris, with several actors carrying over from the first film for narrative continuity. Cinematography is by Igor Martinović, who would shoot Marsh's later Project Nim and The Theory of Everything; this middle entry is the only one of the three shot on 35mm rather than 16mm or RED digital, deliberately distinguishing its visual texture.

Marsh and Grisoni use the real chronology of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation as the spine of the fictional story (the case had run from 1975 onwards and dominated the British press for half a decade) without dramatising the case directly. The film picked up British Independent Film Award nominations and is now widely cited as Considine's strongest dramatic lead alongside Dead Man's Shoes; he would direct his own first feature, Tyrannosaur, two years later.