Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands

Nicolas Winding Refn made Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands eight years after his 1996 debut, returning to the Copenhagen underworld he'd first sketched as a film-school dropout in his mid-twenties. By 2004 Refn was bankrupt — his English-language follow-up Fear X had collapsed — and the Pusher trilogy was conceived in part as financial recovery, two further films shot back-to-back. What looked like commerce became the most acclaimed work of his Danish period: the middle entry shifts the point of view from the original's anti-hero to Tonny, his hapless sidekick, and casts Mads Mikkelsen — two years before Casino Royale — as the lead.

Tonny is released from prison and re-enters the Copenhagen drug trade in pursuit of approval from his father, an ageing gangster known as The Duke (Leif Sylvester Petersen), who runs a chop-shop empire with the bored cruelty of an organisation past its prime. The arrival of Charlotte (Anne Sørensen) and a baby she names as Tonny's complicates everything. Cinematographer Morten Søborg shoots Copenhagen in raw fluorescents and grain, and the RESPECT tattoo across the back of Tonny's shaved head becomes a study in how desperately the character wants the thing it announces.

Pusher II won Bodil Best Danish Film, Robert Best Film, Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay in 2005, and is frequently cited as the strongest of the trilogy. Mikkelsen's performance — tender, panicked, almost wordlessly physical — is regarded as one of the great Danish screen turns of the decade, and the film is the clearest bridge between Refn's gritty early Danish register and the formal pop-aesthetic he would refine in Drive.