Utilizing a controlled aesthetic schema far more reminiscent of his subsequent Bronson and Valhalla Rising then the high-wire handheld style of his Pusher trilogy, Nicolas Wending Refn makes an unnerving if uneven transition to American shores with his generically titled U.S. debut Fear X. Refn’s grip on his deliberately paced, hallucinatory material – which was…

The whole is far less than the sum of its parts in Drive Angry, Patrick Lussier’s belligerent attempt at a disreputable B-movie. With tawdry violence as its primary goal, Lussier’s film goes overboard with sleazy cheese, from crazed carnage and gratuitous T&A – both of which peak during a sequence in which Nic Cage guns…

Capping his Pusher trilogy with its most gripping and incisive installment, Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t provide closure to his saga with I’m the Angel of Death; rather, he expands its overarching vision of underworld nastiness, the universal yearning for escape, and the cruel hand of fate. Refn’s multi-character tale here turns its attention to Bosnian…

Nicolas Winding Refn’s handheld camerawork has lost none of its anxious bite in the years since 1996’s Pusher, as With Blood on My Hands proves a bleaker, more assured follow-up that switches its focus from Frank to his dim-witted pal Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen). Having apparently survived Frank’s beating, Tonny is released from prison and goes…

Pusher may share superficial similarities with the work of ‘90s crime-film godfather Quentin Tarantino, but Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s electrifying debut soon morphs into something far more opaque and unsettling than a mere genre retread. In a Copenhagen brimming with scumbags and whores, mid-level drug dealer Frank (Kim Bodnia) and his crony Tonny (Mads…

Re-envisioning The Bad Seed with Blair Witch POV gimmickry, Home Movie delivers a compilation of the Poe family’s titular footage, which increasingly comes to center on the psychotic pastimes of the clan’s twin boy and girl. Writer/director Christopher Dunn suggests all sorts of reasons for the pathologically silent kids’ actions, which start off as merely…

Laced with a fatalism as romantic as its Beantown milieu is damp and grungy, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (based on George V. Higgins’ best-seller) affords Robert Mitchum a world-weary role that both hews to – and yet evocatively undercuts – his legendary tough-guy persona. In a manner somewhat akin to Clint Eastwood’s reevaluation of…

Nicholas Ray’s expressionistic color-coded widescreen is nothing short of revelatory in Bigger Than Life, a masterful melodrama whose aesthetic beauty works in service of a stinging social critique. Trapped in a life of ‘50s Norman Rockwell banality, full of polite bridge-playing dinner parties and talk of vacations that never materialize, elementary school teacher Ed Avery…

Takers’ bank robbers are clearly clueless about there being no honor among thieves, since despite some minor reservations, they’re quite comfortable reenlisting with shady former cohort Ghost (T.I.) after he gets out of jail for serving time because of a prior heist gone wrong. Then again, since John Luessenhop’s film is merely a mini-Michael Mann…

Skewering organized religion, consumerism, and both American peace-and-love hippiedom and militarism via a surreal search for spiritual enlightenment, The Holy Mountain is a rainbow-hued phantasmagoria of Dali-esque dementia. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film is at once more lucid and batshit insane than his prior cult classic El Topo, making its social satire more overt and yet streaking…