Bronson

Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson arrived in 2008 as the Danish director's first English-language feature, a pivot from the Copenhagen underworld of his Pusher trilogy to a UK prison system filmed with the formal brashness of a Kubrick homage. The film took Best Film at the Sydney Film Festival in 2009 and at the Stockholm International Film Festival in 2008, and earned Refn three nominations at the British Independent Film Awards — Best Director, Best Actor for Tom Hardy and Best Achievement in Production. It is the film that turned Hardy from a working character actor into a leading-man prospect; everything from Inception to Mad Max: Fury Road traces back to this performance.

The film opens with Michael Peterson, a respectable middle-class boy from Luton, walking into a post office with a sawn-off shotgun and walking out with £26.18 — the petty crime that begins a 34-year sentence in instalments. Renaming himself Charles Bronson after the American actor, he sets about earning a reputation as Britain's most violent prisoner. Refn frames the story as Bronson's own music-hall monologue to an unseen theatre audience, Hardy in white-face make-up addressing the camera while the prison years play out around him. Larry Smith's photography (Kubrick's gaffer on Eyes Wide Shut) gives the institutional interiors a glassy, theatrical light, and the soundtrack — Glass, Wagner, the Pet Shop Boys, Verdi — runs the prison riots as opera.

Critics found a film willing to admire its subject's showmanship without softening him: it holds a 76% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.0 on IMDb against the obvious headwind of its content. Hardy gained more than two stone of muscle for the role and met the real Bronson in prison during preparation; the resulting performance is routinely listed among the great British screen turns of the 2000s. The film has since become a touchstone for the stylised-violence register Refn would push further in Drive and Only God Forgives, and a permanent cult fixture in the UK indie canon.