Pusher 2 (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2004)

We're back amongst the hopeless underworld menagerie established by Refn in 1996, a world where characters lurch from threat to threat, pushed and pulled along by the twin intoxicants of coke and porn. The film's spartan dogme style, all natural light and hand-held camera, never comes across as an affectation or a nagging reminder of budgetary constraints (or indeed the limitations of Refn himself, who admitted last time round that scenes were shot in the order they appeared in the end product because to do otherwise would have confused him), but rather as the only medium suitable for the fragile and desperate predicament of the characters.
Modern Tarantino-aping British crime cinema, even when it seeks it, rarely achieves this level of truthfulness or immediacy: the sex and violence depicted are stark, flailing and stripped of all glamour, the principal players downright ugly. Mads Mikkelsen, later to get his share of the big bucks as the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, is simply astonishingly compelling as the no-hoper Tonny, who stumbles and bluffs his way in the world outside prison to an epiphany of sorts.

8/10