Bronson

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn, Nicolas Winding Refn

2009 / 92min / 35mm

The film that established Danish filmmaker Refn as the new enfant terrible to watch, the darkly comic Bronson—based on the real-life story of English career criminal Michael Peterson—succeeds in making its brutish, incurably violent central character a figure of unlikely sympathy by virtue of Refn’s bravura cinematic storytelling, and an anguished, insanely committed lead performance by Tom Hardy, whose Peterson is no malicious monster but instead a soulful outsider spurned by society. “Theatrical, creative, and brilliant.”—Michael Peterson