Drive

Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by: Hossein Amini
Full credits at IMDb

Brooding, sophisticated and drop-dead gorgeous, Drive is lowbrow trash rewrit as highbrow treasure. Its clumsy coincidences, unnaturalistic expository dialogue and pulpy themes—vengeance, sacrifice, redemption—are brought to life with elegance and gravitas: it's the action movie treated like art, the cinematic equivalent of literary genre fiction. Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed mechanic with sidelines as both stuntman and getaway driver. He's a stoic loner steeped in Jean-Pierre Melvillean melancholy, possessed of preternatural driving abilities, capable of both honorable service and shocking barbarity.

At the same time, director Nicolas Winding Refn has said, "I've always wanted to remake [Sixteen Candles] in one way or another and, in a very unlikely way, I've done that in Drive." The movie switches between two tones: the world-weary and the romantic.

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