Fantastic Fest 2009

The story of Charles Bronson, Britain's most notorious and certainly most violent criminals, is a bloody and hallucinatory exploration of the man and what he calls his "art." Nicolas Winding Refn (The Pusher trilogy) captures to perfection the brutal intensity of the man. Charles Bronson is the antihero of his own story. From a very young age he has been leading a life of unconscionable violence. After a stint as a bare-knuckle boxer in back alleys, 19-year-old Michael Peterson entered a post office with a sawed-off shotgun and the half-cocked ambition of gaining some notoriety. Easily caught, he was shipped off to prison for seven years, but shortly after confinement, he embarked on a long and theatrical prison career as Charles Bronson, snarling sociopath and despair of the UK penal system. So far, he has served 34 years behind bars, 30 in solitary confinement for multiple episodes of vicious assaults, multiple hostage situations and other manifestations of the "art" he is compelled to create. Following his rising profile and his fall from grace, the stylistic Bronson features a tour de force performance by Tom Hardy, who plays Bronson with the same ferocity and intensity whether he is stripped naked and screaming or sitting down for tea. Terrifying and fascinating, superb and engrossing, Bronson depicts this criminal in his search for fame and notoriety. It is a meditation on violence that mixes the stylistic brutality of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange with disturbing blood and guts realism. This journey takes you deep into the twisted mind of one of the most violent criminals alive. (Kate Brown)