Nicolas Winding Refn

Both Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”) and Mads Mikkelsen made their debuts with this independent crime film, the first of a famous trilogy, and Mikkelsen plays the kind of friend nobody would want. It all happens in one grim week in Copenhagen, with heroin and a huge debt that needs paying off fast. — Frank deals heroin in Copenhagen and talks a lot about himself. When a Swede orders more than he can afford, his supplier Milo lets him have the drugs on credit. But the police turn up at the handover, Frank throws the lot into a lake, and he walks out of the station owing a gargantuan sum. — Nominated for Best Restored Film | Venice Film Festival | 2024

Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”) made the second part of his Copenhagen underworld trilogy to pay off the debt he ran up on his previous film. Mads Mikkelsen stars as a man everyone has written off, starting with his own gangster father, and you’ll be rooting for him to the very end. — Tonny gets out of prison and heads straight to his father’s garage to ask for work. His father makes his living stealing cars, takes his son on trial and mocks him in front of his men. Then Charlotte tells Tonny he’s the father of her child and demands money. He decides to give fatherhood a go, though nothing in his life suggests he’ll be any good at it.

Imagine the most over-the-top episode of “America’s Next Top Model” directed by Dario Argento, all blood and glitter. Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”) is colour-blind, so everything he shoots is drenched in vivid colour, and here Elle Fanning arrives in LA with her beauty as her only currency. — Sixteen-year-old Jesse has just arrived in Los Angeles and has never modelled before, yet within weeks her career takes off and everyone wants to book her. The other models can’t help asking what she has that they don’t. And she’s staying in a motel run by a man she shouldn’t trust. — Cannes Soundtrack Award | Cannes Film Festival | 2016

Refn closes his trilogy with the only character who appears in all three parts, the ageing Serbian gangster played by Zlatko Burić. One packed day sees him cooking, fighting his addiction and taking delivery of the wrong drugs, and it makes for a powerful ending with some surprising Polish touches. — At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, the gangster Milo admits he’s afraid of his daughter’s birthday. Milena turns twenty-five today, and he’s cooking for the whole party himself. On top of that, instead of the heroin he ordered he gets ten thousand ecstasy pills, and he has no idea who to sell them to. So he hands the job to a young dealer and goes back to the kitchen.

Two years after “Drive”, Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling teamed up again, and this time Gosling gets just seventeen lines while Bangkok does the talking for him. There are red corridors, a sword fight and a mother nobody is safe around. — Julian and his brother Billy run a muay thai club in Bangkok that serves as a front for drug money. When Billy kills a girl in a brothel, a policeman hands him over to her father and lets him settle the matter himself. Their mother Crystal flies in from America to bury one son and send the other off to avenge him. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2013