Bleeder

This gruelling drama finds the director of Pusher seeking to broaden his emotional range and break out of crime genre histrionics. But he's so good at that stuff, he can't quite keep the blood and guts off the screen. A grimly funny portrait of a group of immature friends in deadend jobs failing to connect with women (or indeed reality), this feels a little like a Danish Nil by Mouth with a touch of Clerks thrown in. Bodnia especially has some powerful scenes. Yet the more intense the movie gets, the less credible it becomes. A lovely sequence in which a woman simply browses in a bookshop shows how much more the director has to offer; at the moment he's still too close to these self-punishing men.