Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2011)

Nicholas Winding Refn has already proven himself one of the most auspicious film makers of his generation. His debut film Pusher, chronicled a period in the life of a long time, small fish drug dealer in Copenhagen. Like much of the subject matter Refn seems to have a preference for, there's nothing necessarily groundbreaking, original or unusual about it. The unusual part of his films is in the actual fabric of how he tells a story, and Pusher was the introduction to his atmospheric, moody film making. The two subsequent films in the Pusher trilogy examine Copenhagen's drug world from two other characters perspectives. These films were extremely popular in Europe, and gained him some recognition from people in the U.S. film industry.

The first time the majority of us heard the name Nicholas Winding Refn, it was because of a little film called Bronson (my original review), based on the autobiographies of a man who legally changed his name to Charles Bronson, and is notorious for being the most violent prisoner in the whole of the United Kingdom. It's also the movie that introduced most of us to Tom Hardy (now one of the busiest and most sought after actors in Hollywood), whose performance was like a high speed freight train trampling the audience psyche. The film succeeded not only in being perversely and thoroughly entertaining, but also in conveying the psychology of a truly bizarre and unusual individual. It proved Refn wasn't afraid to reach beyond audience expectations of what they should see.