Film: Pusher Nicholas Winding Refn (18)

A booming rock soundtrack, quick cutting and a director of photography who appears to have Parkinson's disease: these are the trademarks of the hip but hopeless independent film and we are wise to be wary of them. But though Pusher has all these elements present and correct, you are advised to peer beneath the abrasive surface where you will find a movie of unfaltering intelligence. It's the simple tale of a Copenhagen drug dealer, Frank (Kim Bodnia), who faces severe personal injury if he cannot repay the debt he owes to a local gangster.

There's an anthropological lilt to the director Nikolas Winding Refn's style. Whether choreographing kinetic violence or immersing us in protracted verite passages, his prime concern is charting the gradual implosion of a man gripped in the teeth of a vice.