Pusher III

Nicolas Winding Refn made the second and third Pusher films back to back in 2004 and 2005, having gone bankrupt on the English-language Fear X and needing the work. The trilogy's final part premiered at the Copenhagen International Film Festival and hands the film to Zlatko Burić's Milo, the Serbian supplier who has been the fixed point of the whole series since 1996.

The action covers roughly a day. Milo is in recovery, sitting in a church-hall meeting and admitting to nothing much; he is also catering his daughter Milena's birthday party himself, and a consignment of ecstasy has arrived where the heroin should have been. Refn shoots in the same handheld, available-light register as the earlier films, and lets long stretches pass on cooking, on waiting, on a man his age being patronised by younger dealers.

Burić — who had played Milo as comic relief in 1996 — carries it, and Refn structures the film so that the criminal business is mostly an interruption of the domestic one. It holds 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 3.88 Letterboxd average from 47,000 ratings, the best-reviewed entry in the trilogy, and it completes the set alongside Pusher and Pusher II, both already in the catalogue. Be warned: the last third is as hard to watch as anything Refn has made.