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Pusher and its two sequels make one of the best gangster movie trilogies of all time. The 1996 Danish film was director Nicolas Winding Refn's debut feature: an explosive way to begin a filmography that would later include other cult classics like Bronson, Drive and Only God Forgives. Eight years after making Pusher, Refn was inspired by ambitious TV series that were hits in the 2000s, like The Wire and The Sopranos, to turn his gangster story into a serialized effort. So, Pusher 2 came out in 2004 and Pusher 3 soon after, in 2005.

The trilogy explores the drug dealing scene in Copenhagen through three main characters, one at the forefront of each film. They are all pushers who take the drugs they sell, highlighting how most people involved in this illegal business are people with substance-use disorders themselves. Much like the greatest gangster trilogy of all time, The Godfather, the...

The Marrakech International Film Festival has unveiled the 10 cinema figures who will participate in its In Conversation With program at its 20th edition running from November 24 to December 2.

They comprise Australian actor Simon Baker, French director Bertrand Bonello, U.S. actor Willem Dafoe, Indian filmmaker and producer Anurag Kashyap; Japanese director Naomi Kawase; Danish-u.S. actor and director Viggo Mortensen; U.K. actor Tilda Swinton; and Russian director and screenwriter Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen and Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaïdi, who will receive the festival’s honorary Étoile d’or prize this year, will also participate in the program.

Baker’s was seen most recently in Toronto title Limbo and Tribeca 2022 selection Blaze, with early features including L.A. Confidential (1997), David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011), followed by hit series The Mentalist (2008–2015).

Bensaïdi’s first feature A Thousand Months world premiered...

A new month is here and Plex is back with the latest additions to its library of over 50,000 free-to-stream titles! From the Oscar-winning bio-drama “Spotlight” to the hit Danish crime thriller “Pusher” franchise, there is plenty to keep you entertained as October turns to November.

Check out The Streamable’s top picks for what’s new this month on Plex!

Watch Now Tba plex.tv What are the 5 Best Shows and Movies Coming to Plex in November 2023? “An American Werewolf In London” | Wednesday, Nov. 1

The 1981 hit John Landis comedy stars David Naughton and Griffin Dunne as a pair of American backpackers who are attacked by a werewolf while travelling in Yorkshire, turning one of them into a werewolf with the next full moon. Jenny Agutter, John Woodvine, Don McKillip, Frank Oz, Sydney Bromley, and more American and British greats make up the rest of the ensemble.

Watch the trailer for...

International cinema offers a variety of films with unique storytelling techniques and genres, providing a different viewing experience from Hollywood movies. Foreign films have had a significant influence on American pop culture, with examples like the Japanese Jidaigeki genre inspiring Star Wars and French New Wave cinema influencing Martin Scorsese's crime films. There are many lesser-known international films beyond the popular ones like Parasite that Hollywood movie fans may enjoy.

International cinema has a great variety of films to explore, from different eras and genres, many of which American movie audiences might not be familiar with. Whether they be in subtitles or not, foreign films often follow different beats than American film viewers are used to. Without the massive budgets that go into Hollywood's film engine, filmmakers from other countries have relied on their own creative techniques to tell their stories, often being the ones to innovate cinema in ways Hollywood would later follow.

It’s the most spookiest time of the year, and you’ll find a smorgasbord of creepy content on the Hulu streaming service in October! Not only has the streamer secured recent theatrical releases like Cobweb and Slotherhouse for you, but Huluween is here again to make sure things go bump in the night.

Huluween highlights this year include the first season of Living for the Dead, which comes from the creators of Netflix’s popular Queer Eye. Join five queer ghost hunters – Alex Le May, Juju Bae, Ken Boggle, Logan Taylor and Roz Hernandez – as they travel to a range of the world’s most haunted locations in an attempt to help the living by healing the dead.

Hulu will also premiere Monster Inside: America’s Most Extreme Haunted House from director Andrew Renzi. The new documentary follows the story of “Navy Veteran turned master of horror” Russ McKamey. His home,...

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for Hulu! Oct. 1 kicks off the streamer’s annual Huluween offerings with dozens of spine-tingling series and films added to the platform, from horror classics like Stephen King’s “It” to new Hulu Originals like “Appendage.”

If you on the squeamish side, Hulu hasn’t forgotten you and will be adding dozens more titles this month and streaming major season premieres the day after they air, including new season of “The Simpsons,” “Bob's Burgers,” and more.

30-Day Free Trial $7.99+ / month hulu.com What are the 5 Best Shows and Movies Coming to Hulu in October 2023? “Appendage” | Monday, Oct. 2

Hulu’s latest original horror film “Appendage” joins the platform on Oct. 2 after its SXSW debut earlier this year. In it, Hannah, a young fashion designer who seems fine on the surface but secretly struggles with debilitating self-doubt begins to see her health decline...

The competition line-ups of the 26th edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival have also been revealed. The Sarajevo Film Festival, taking place online this year from 14 to 21 August, has announced that Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen will be awarded the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo. The star of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher, Pusher 2 and Valhalla Rising, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt and Another Round, Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair, the James Bond title Casino Royale which restarted the franchise in 2006, plus an assortment of Hollywood movies such as Clash of the Titans, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Arctic, as well as the NBC show Hannibal, will hold a masterclass for Sarajevo's online audience. The Danish star joins Michel Franco (whose works will also play in the festival’s “Tribute to” programme) as a recipient of Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, as previously announced (read.

With the release of The Dark Knight Rises and the completion of the Dark Knight Trilogy it had me thinking of where it falls when compared to other classic trilogies. Trilogies used to be reserved for a select few, but now everything has a trilogy. I mean Step Up had a trilogy…until they made another movie and now it’s a quadrilogy. To be fair there is a lot of plot in that series so four movies were absolutely necessary. In fact I’m quite surprised Step Up Revolutions wasn’t split up into two parts. That’s not to say that there aren’t any great ones out there, because there are quite a few and I hope to point out some of those today. I created a list of what I think are the best trilogies ever made. I considered a few things when making this list.

He made his name in Pusher and Open Hearts and went on to be a Bond baddie. But he is still waiting to work with Lars von Trier – and still trying to keep things radical

Mads Mikkelsen, as handsome as you like, lowers himself into a seat, rolls a cigarette and stares handsomely out over the sea. Did I mention he was handsome? Not only is he wearing the kind of shiny suit that only the handsomest among us can get away with, he's also sporting a radioactive tan that sets off his handsomely glittering eyes. The tan, he says, is because he's just come back from shooting a western in South Africa, not, I'm relieved to discover, the latest manifestation of the World Conspiracy of Handsomeness.

Oh well. It's safe to say that the way Mikkelsen, 48, looks has not hurt him in his quest to become a well-known and successful actor.

Okay, kids, strap yourselves in because things are about to get a little bit crazy!The Twitch presented retrospective With Blood On His Hands: The Films Of Nicolas Winding Refn at the Tiff Bell Lightbox is now well and truly under way with both Pusher and Bleeder screening yesterday and the bulk of the remaining filmography screening either tonight or over the weekend. And, as always, we've got two pairs of tickets for every screening to give away and we've got to get our winners to the Tiff box office folk before business closes up at the end of the day. Which means over the course of today we have to give away two pairs of tickets for each of Fear X, Pusher II: With Blood...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Feature James Clayton

As the divisive Only God Forgives opens in the UK, James salutes the work of its director, Nicolas Winding Refn...

Ryan Gosling doesn't need an excuse for violence. He does violence very well and always looks handsome when he's doing it. Nevertheless, in Only God Forgives - the new film by Nicolas Winding Refn - Kristen Scott Thomas is his mother and she has arrived in Bangkok to give Gosling a reason to commit hyper-stylised acts of brutality.

Upset by the death of her eldest, Mother instructs her other son (Gosling's Julian) to get revenge. You should always listen to your mother and, really, any justification for more gratuitous Gosling ultraviolence should be eagerly pounced upon and pushed to the maximum. It's only right that Only God Forgives follows through as a pummelling neon-lit nightmare of bloody physicality fronted by a taciturn blonde pin-up.

Only God Forgives...

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to the darkly stylish Drive is the even more violent Only God Forgives. Is he revelling in sexual brutality?

"So," asks Nicolas Winding Refn, as we sit down for lunch in a swish new place in King's Cross, London, "what was the first reaction you had to my film? What was the first thought that went through your mind?"

Not only is this a reversal of the traditional interview roles, it's also a tricky question. The film under review is Only God Forgives, the follow-up to Refn's critically acclaimed and commercially successful Drive. Imagine a Quentin Tarantino homage to oriental slasher movies but directed by David Lynch at his most elliptical and unsettling, and you might get some idea of the strangeness of Only God Forgives. It features Ryan Gosling as a boxing promoter and drug dealer with impotence issues, Kristin Scott Thomas as his blond,...

For a low-budget Danish crime drama, Pusher has come far, with two sequels and now a second, London-set remake. And, the original's director Nicolas Winding Refn warns, there are plenty more on the way …

In October 1997, Nicolas Winding Refn sat watching old sci-fi movies in an attic room in a small hotel off Oxford Street. A few days past his 27th birthday, the fledgling Danish director had been brought to Britain to promote his first film, a low-budget crime drama called Pusher. "It was a glorious moment," he recalls. "The film had done more than I ever thought it could – it had left Copenhagen. For me that was like making Star Wars."

Fifteen years on, he sits in another, larger Soho hotel – a sleek and genial figure whose last film, the neon-lit thriller Drive, carried him into Hollywood's upper levels. A London-set remake of his debut is about to be released,...

Article by Dan Clark

With the release of The Dark Knight Rises and the completion of the Dark Knight Trilogy it had me thinking of where it falls when compared to other classic trilogies. Trilogies used to be reserved for a select few, but now everything has a trilogy. I mean Step Up had a trilogy…until they made another movie and now it’s a quadrilogy. To be fair there is a lot of plot in that series so four movies were absolutely necessary. In fact I’m quite surprised Step Up Revolutions wasn’t split up into two parts. That’s not to say that there aren’t any great ones out there, because there are quite a few and I hope to point out some of those today. I created a list of what I think are the best trilogies ever made. I considered a few things when making this list.

[With Easy Money opening this week in New York in limited release, we revisit our review from the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.] It is very easy to see why Daniel Espinosa's Easy Money triggered a feeding frenzy among international distributors earlier this year. Because it deserves it. The best Nordic crime film since Nicholas Winding Refn's Pusher II, Espinosa's picture boasts an ever so slightly more commercial sheen to it than does Refn's and that slight touch is enough to cross it over from a loyal - and deserved - cult audience to the potential of mass appeal. Anchored by a trio of stellar performances; murky morals; a script that balances style, smarts and surprising depth, this is a solid piece of entertainment that...

As is common knowledge in all quarters, the addition of Mads Mikkelsen to any project instantly and irrevocably makes said project at least mildly interesting. If you actually need proof, all one could ask for lies in a story from Variety, which tells us that the Pusher II and Casino Royale actor will, along with Evan Rachel Wood, co-star with Shia Labeouf in The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman.

This comes only a few days after we reported that Labeouf would be leading the Fredrik Bond-directed, Matt Drake-penned “gritty pulp romance,” which revolves around “normal guy who falls for a woman who has been claimed by a violent crime boss.” Good timing on the casting; Wood will play Gabi Banyai, a woman that the titular character “falls in love with after her father dies on a plane next to him,” while Mikkelsen has been cast as “Nigel, Gabi’s violent estranged husband,...

It was thirteen years ago when Dogme 95 co-founder Thomas Vinterberg made an international splash with Festen, or The Celebration, but his career since then hasn’t lived up to that sophomore feature effort. And although this is arguably a little late, it looks like he might finally have something more promising ready to go in the near-future.

ScreenDaily (via ThePlaylist) reports that the director is getting ready to collaborate with Mads Mikkelsen on The Hunt, a drama written by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, co-writer on his latest film, Submarino. In the film, the Pusher II star will play “a recent divorcé in a small rural town, who’s accused of abusing a small child.” Those Danes know how to make a fun time at the movies.

Also in the cast are Susse Wold, Thomas Bo Larsen, Lars Ranthe, and Anne Louise Hassing, and shooting will begin soon — like, Friday soon.

Mads Mikkelsen will receive the European Film Academy's European Achievement in World Cinema 2011 Honorary Award "in recognition of a unique contribution to the world of film." Previous recipients include Milos Forman, Roman Polanski, Antonio Banderas, Lars von Trier, Isabelle Huppert, Maurice Jarre, Liv Ullmann, Roberto Benigni, Gabriel Yared, and Victoria Abril. Among the Danish-born Mikkelsen's credits are Nicolas Winding Refn’s crime dramas Pusher (1996) and With Blood on My Hands: Pusher II (2004); Anders Thomas Jensen's The Green Butchers (2003) and Adam's Apples (2005); Susanne Bier's Open Hearts (2002) and the Oscar-nominated After the Wedding (2006); and Ole Christian Madsen's Flame and Citron (2008). Outside of Denmark, Mikkelsen was the creepy villain with the bleeding eye in Martin Campbell's Casino Royale (2006); Igor Stravinsky in Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009); a corporate go-getter with a past in Peter Lindmark's Swedish drama Exit (2009); One Eye in Winding Refn's English-language Valhalla Rising...

Updated.

"A spasmodically violent, creatively cast and off-center fast-cars-and-crime drama, Drive belongs to a rarified genre subset of stripped down, semi-arty and quasi-existentialist action films that includes Point Blank, Bullitt and The Driver," begins Todd McCarthy. "With Ryan Gosling ably incarnating a pent-up man of few words who goes to great lengths to make one positive gesture in a rotten world, Danish wunderkind Nicolas Winding Refn has fashioned an atmospheric and engaging glorified potboiler that nonetheless seems powered by a half-empty creative tank." Also in the Hollywood Reporter: Gregg Kilday interviews Refn.

Xan Brooks in the Guardian: "Ryan Gosling stars as Driver, who flips cars for a living and occasionally moonlights as a getaway man for jewel thieves and bank robbers, offering them five minutes of his time, after which they're on their own. Driver, we soon come to realise, is an American riff on Jean-Pierre Melville's solitary samurai,...

Piranha 3Dd has one more potential victim: Katrina Bowden, who plays the equally tiny, hot and self-absorbed assistant Cerie on 30 Rock, is now part of the cast. I don't think I need to run down all the obvious potential perks of this casting for fans of her character on that show. I mean, we don't need to get all lascivious here. But yes, she'll be better to look at than David Koechner. The film also features Gary Busey, Danielle Panabaker, Matt Bush, Chris Zylka, Meagan Tandy, Paul James Jordan, Jean-Luc Bilodeau, Hector Jimenez, Adrian Martinez, and Clu Gulager, and is shooting now in North Carolina. Still waiting to hear about the porn starlets that will be cast; Piranha has a reputation to maintain, after all. After the break, the rather inexplicable remake of Nicolas Winding Refn's great crime movie Pusher gets a remake cast, and an endorsement from Mr Refn.

The cast has been announced for Luis Prieto's English-language remake of Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 crime flick Pusher. The original film centers on a drug dealer who gets arrested and loses a massive amount of product in the process. He spends the rest of the film running through the criminal underground of Copenhagen trying to find a way to make up the lost stash before his employer kills him. While the original Pusher is a good movie, it's also the weakest of the trilogy, and I'll be interested to see if Prieto remakes the sequels With Blood on My Hands: Pusher II and I'm the Angel of Death: Pusher III (although ironically the sequels were made so that Refn could pay off debt). According to THR, the remake will transplant the action to London and star Agyness Deyn, Richard Coyle, Bronson Webb, and Paul Kaye. Filming is slated to begin next week.

It is very easy to see why Daniel Espinosa's Easy Money triggered a feeding frenzy among international distributors earlier this year. Because it deserves it. The best Nordic crime film since Nicholas Winding Refn's Pusher II, Espinosa's picture boasts an ever so slightly more commercial sheen to it than does Refn's and that slight touch is enough to cross it over from a loyal - and deserved - cult audience to the potential of mass appeal. Anchored by a trio of stellar performances; murky morals; a script that balances style, smarts and surprising depth, this is a solid piece of entertainment that also satisfies on much more complex levels.

Espinosa begins with a trio of seemingly disconnected stories. There is Jorge, the convicted criminal busting out of prison despite having just a year left on his sentence. There is Mrado, the Serbian gang enforcer charged with running Jorge to...

It looks like I had a slow week since six of these choices are grouped into two spots, but there's a reason for all that as I will detail below. As always, remember you can keep tabs on my personal Netflix queue right here. Now, here's the recap of my week in movies... Shocker (1989), Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and The People Under the Stairs (1991) Quick Thoughts: I watched these three Wes Craven features as they will be released on September 15 in a three-movie Wes Craven Collection, which you can buy at Amazon right now for only $15.49. Are they greatest of films? Nope, and The Serpent and the Rainbow is probably my least favorite of the bunch as I never get too into movies involving any kind of voodoo or hoodoo stuff. However, both Shocker and The People Under the Stairs were so wildly stupid I managed to have a lot of fun with them.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn is becoming a name around the world for his unflinching blow to your visual sense with ‘Bronson.’ Many will look back in years down the road and look at that film that launched Refn’s career as a mainstream filmmaker. However, ‘Bronson’ is far from Refn’s debut as a director. It has been 13 years since his first film, ‘Pusher,’ and, though he has grown more confident as a filmmaker, his debut is just as riveting and stark as anything he has done since.

Kim Bodnia stars as Frank, a mid-level drug dealer on the streets of Copenhagen. Frank wants to make it big, and he sees his opportunity for great things when he is confronted by a former cellmate. The two set up a large deal, and Frank must go to a local supplier, Milo, to get the drugs. Frank owes Milo money from previous deals,...