On the heels of substantial festival buzz Nicolas Winding Refn sat down for a roundtable to talk Bronson, his take on the man the British media once labeled “Most Violent Prisoner.” Refn has been a filmmaker to watch since the first of the Pusher Trilogy debuted, earning accolades for its raw portrayal of low level hustling on the streets of Copenhagen. A decade later he’s managed to pull The Charlie Bronson Story out of development hell, taking it beyond the expected ripped-from-the-headlines account and into the realm of the surreal.

Here’s his candid explanation of what makes Bronson more than a prison movie, why he had no interest in making a standard biopic, and how two very different meetings earned Tom Hardy some hard time as the UK’s most notorious inmate.

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BRONSON, directed by Nicholas Winding Refn (Pusher trilogy), is the story of a notorious British jailbird “Charles Bronson” played by character actor Tom Hardy. Refn collaborated on the screenplay with Brock Norman Brock, based loosely on the subject’s popular autobiography about his time in prison.

Check out our review below…

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For decades, The Ram was the king of the ring. He was the strutting embodiment of every twelve-year-old’s heroic fantasy. Righteous. Powerful. Invincible. Now he’s playing for peanuts to a handful of fans in high school gymnasiums, tossing around grateful amateurs and sleeping in his van. There is the man that was and the man that is, both of them painfully etched in the opening ten minutes, before director Darrin Aronofsky allows us a glimpse of his face.

A top-billed relic on a small circuit, Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) is valiantly ignoring the due date on his career. He’s got bad joints and tired muscles. He owes back rent and keeps a part-time job in a supermarket storeroom. But the moment the he walks to the mat, he transforms from a creaky has-been to a living legend, spinning on the top rope and scissor-kicking with style.

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Out on the terrace at the Four Seasons, Mickey Rourke smokes a cigarette and chats with one of the handlers. Nattily dressed in a pinstripe suit with a clashing green vest, he looks the way you’d imagine Mickey Rourke to look, and it magnifies the extremes taken to transform him into The Wrestler. The torso-length blonde mane is gone and the gun show has left town. He still seems like he can break you in half over his knee, but minus Randy “The Ram’s” labored gait that’s like gravity working extra-hard to yank him into a crumpled heap.

The buzz around the movie is good and Rourke has decided to enjoy it. Sometimes it’s hard to get a question in. He can’t stop talking about the fight work, the culture of wrestling, the endless months of practice and exertion he put in to prove to director Darrin Aronofsky he hadn’t made a mistake. To show his director he understood what it took to make it happen, and that he was going to return to favor.

Here’s what Rourke had to tell Screencrave about what he considers the toughest gig of his entire career, and why he believes Aronofsky was the only guy ready to pull him through it.

First thing’s first, though: he has to pet the dog.

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As she bills time in big fares like Wild Hogs or Anger Management, Marisa Tomei has been building a stealth career in indie circles. In the Bedroom was the game-changing critical darling. She stole scenes as the two-timing Gina in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Most stars are happy to get pigeonholed for life, with minor exceptions, because the work is guaranteed. Angelina Jolie will always get suitcases of money to play asskicking femme-fatales. Try to find a variation of middle class manchild that Adam Sandler won’t tackle for a solid script and a good price.

That’s not to say the aforementioned haven’t taken left turns here and there, or that Tomei herself is above a safe, studio gig. But with a project from the Duplass Brothers (writer/directors of Screencrave-fave Baghead) on the horizon and now Aronofsky’s The Wrestler opening this weekend, Marisa Tomei’s trajectory is becoming impossible to predict. She doesn’t have a packaged anecdote for why this is so, and she bristles when she’s pressed about it. She’s attracted by the ambiguous and, for lack of a better term, the ugly truth. She’s inspired by it.

Last week she spoke to ScreenCrave about what gives The Wrestler its edge, and how she managed to take some of the shine off the Stripper with A Heart o’ Gold.

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December Twenty-Fifth is nearly upon us, and while the TV networks, movie theaters, and school pageants try to get everyone in the giving mood, there is a sinister side to the yuletide.

Those fleeting hours of cellophane-shredding euphoria will require a measure of pain and sacrifice.  Between now and Christmas morning there is the gauntlet of jammed parking lots, psychotic families, and maxed-out credit cards.

With the endless loop of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas (is You)” pumping us full of sweetness and light, it’s nice to sit down with a movie that pumps the holiday spirit full of lead.

Without further ado, here is Screencrave’s list of quality entertainment that is worth the green when you’re seeing red.

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Doing justice to one cultural icon is a challenge. In Cadillac Records, writer-director Darnell Martin speeds through six, count ‘em, six music legends in two hours. It should come as no surprise that the result can be a bumpy ride. Mostly it plays like polished cable fare blessed with a run on the big screen, but there are a few highlights, including the most outstanding cast in recent memory.

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If baseball is America’s national pastime, what about a national obsession? Guns? Religion? Nascar? A poorly concealed appreciation for contraband? An argument could be made for each, but in the USA, the birthplace of the modern auto industry and manifest destiny, Yankee Stadium or a tent revival cannot compete with our love of progress. Search youtube for footage of a building imploding, then ask yourself how many months or years it took to build.

Razing a ten story housing project can take seconds. Tracking the erosion of a neighborhood is a bit trickier, a speed bump that filmmaker D.W. Young may have discovered too little, too late shooting A Hole in a Fence, his brief-but-compelling glance into a threatened urban sanctuary.

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Yesterday afternoon Sony Pictures held a forty-five minute press conference for its upcoming ensemble drama Cadillac Records. Adrien Brody, Columbus Short, Gabrielle Union, Jeffrey Wright, and Eamonn Walker answered questions about the project in a noticeably strained atmosphere. Conspicuously absent was writer-director Darnell Martin, a TV veteran who’s previous feature credit was the 2005 adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry.

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