Critics reviews

There is freshness in "Pusher" that is ahead of its time, the film was made in 1996 but it could have been made today, on a budget. No scene is wasted and every interaction is meaningful, as through Frank's actions we can glimpse his inner workings.

The film practically vibrates with youthful aggression, sly humor and gathering tension, hurling itself forward like a junkie toward the next fix... As punchy mood-setting scenes give way to a full-throttle crisis pitch, Refn delivers a stinging portrait of the peculiar irony of one criminal’s solitude.

This is a taut, edgy, highly believable and compelling piece of work. Its story is simple but its acting and realist documentary direction make for highly powerful viewing... Refn is influenced by Scorsese and Godard, Cassevetes and underground crime documentaries. The film achieves a style of its own though which has earned it the accolade of the greatest Scandinavian crime film ever and one of the more interesting of recent years.

As Refn counts down the days and ratchets up the tension, "Pusher" shifts from a subdued lowlife sketch, with lots of raunchy conversation between Buric and his horndog ex-con buddy Mads Mikkelsen, to a nail-biting look at a man running out of options.

Using available light, spasmodic handheld camerawork, and improvised dialogue, writer/director Refn goes out of his way (in his first feature) to create an everyday world of extraordinary circumstance - then piles on a pounding thrash guitar score and punchy editing to create a kind of electric realism. Scorsese is a touchstone, but it's a long time since he achieved this kind of blistering intensity.

"Pusher" begins as a fairly standard '90s crime saga, almost an open imitation of Quentin Tarantino...But something happens on the way to the film's haunting and ambiguous conclusion: Frank gradually moves front and center, and the story becomes as much about his self-hatred and strangled emotional life as about whether he will survive [the film's] adventures.

Even at five hours, the "Pusher" trilogy isn’t a major epic. It’s more like a collection of first-person short stories, with each protagonist on a long (I mean long) downward spiral. But they’re fascinatingly different kinds of desperadoes, each entangled by a way of life that leaves few men standing.

What Nicholas Wending Refn has cannily done here is give the well-worn drugs and gangs routine a unique slant in a story that is more an unsettling Kafkaesque nightmare than a drugs-arc-ace fairy tale... But despite the gritty subject matter, combined with some clichéd set pieces, interest is retained right through to the bleak end, largely due to the direction and Refn's handling of the excellent cast.

For almost two hours, ''Pusher'' seems to be saying: look how honest and dirty and real we're being, look how we're showing you the dark underbelly of the world that addiction has made. This might be effective if the last drug movie in theaters had been ''The Man With the Golden Arm'' (in which Kim Novak helps Frank Sinatra kick heroin by locking him in a room and hiding the sharp cutlery). More than 40 years later, it seems almost naive.

In interviews, Refn has noted his admiration for directors John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese, and it’s evident in this impressive first feature. Pic feels like a Danish “Mean Streets,” and is as rooted in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district as Scorsese’s movie was in N.Y.’s Little Italy... The subject has been done before, but Refn avoids the cliches, both in the story itself and its telling.