Bronson

Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece A Clockwork Orange was banned in England for nearly 30 years before making an appearance on British television in 2001. It’s a sign of that country’s slackening censorship that Bronson, a schizophrenic attempt at mythologizing a skeevy, real-life British criminal, was released just seven years later. Ironically, Bronson was virtually unreleasable in America last fall, due to the fact that lead actor Tom Hardy spends most of the third act with his shvanz hanging out, naked and covered in black paint. Hardy gives a powerful (if one-note) performance as infamous prisoner Michael Peterson, a petty thief whose sentence was repeatedly extended for brutal fights and serial hostage taking. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn cribs the slo-mo ultraviolence and counterpunching classical soundtrack from A Clockwork Orange, but Bronson lacks the saving grace of a point.