Harmony Korine began his film career early on, gaining recognition for the script he wrote for Larry Clark's Kids while still a teenager. Despite a shared interest in the seedier things in life, Korine’s own films were a complete departure, borrowing more from video collage and the Dogme movement, but with his own distinctly American touches and a carnival approach to filmmaking which suggests things are never quite as they seem. Trash Humpers, Korine’s most recent effort (which recently screened at the New York Film Festival) is also his most experimental, and if you're familiar with past works like Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy in particular, you’ll know that means it's pretty weird.

At first glance, one might expect Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson to be another in an assembly line of violent British crime capers full of cockney thugs and punchy one-liners. But it’s far from that. Bronson is a stark and surreal adventure into the mind of someone who exists in his own reality. It is meticulously staged, colored, and costumed, and it's scored with one of the eeriest and most effective soundtracks in a long time -- full of new wave anthems, heavy dark electro scores, and opera music. Bronson is based on the life of the infamous British inmate Michael Peterson (played by an unrecognizable Tom Hardy), dubbed “Britain’s most violent prisoner,” who spent 35 of his 57 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. Refn’s film avoids typical biopic styling in favor of a picaresque character study on Peterson’s self-inflicted transformation into Charlie Bronson. Successfully merging popular genre-movies with theater traditions and performance art, Refn has created and unsettling portrait of self-mythologizing man.