Bronson

An arty attempt to tell the story of England’s most violent criminal. Born Michael Gordon Peterson, he changed his name to Charles Bronson, because Charles Bronson = awesome. The film deviates from the true story in a number of ways, notably in being really pretentious and obvious. Bronson still has some interesting moments, but director Nicolas Winding Refn seems so convinced of his own genius that he gives short shrift to the interesting life of Bronson/Peterson and spends too much energy creating film-school artiness. If Refn were more inventive, or more subtle, this would have worked, but instead, the movie becomes a series of symbolic moments that could be deciphered by a fairly intelligent chimp who’d taken a freshman class at Simian University on literary symbology and semiotics. Not to denigrate the chimp, but that course is an easy A.