A scene from "Pusher"
Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's nerve-shredding 1996 breakout movie, about an awesomely bad week in the life of the world's most luckless drug dealer, is remade here by Spanish-born Luis Prieto as a London-set exercise in amped-up, strobe-lit urban edginess, culminating in a great reason to go back to the original and forget this one entirely. While assembled with a certain sleek panache and featuring a serviceably charismatic lead performance by Richard Coyle as the hell-bound dealer, the movie misses both the incrementally mounting desperation of Refn's original and its end-of-tether humour. Just say maybe not.
Sept. 7, 9 p.m., Bloor Hot Docs Cinema; Sept. 9, 12 p.m., Cineplex Yonge & Dundas