drive ryan gosling movie review

The existential getaway driver

The Driver drives for hire. He has no other name, and no other life. When we first see him, he’s the wheelman for a getaway car, who runs from police pursuit not only by using sheer speed and muscle, but by coolly exploiting the street terrain and outsmarting his pursuers. By day, he is a stunt driver for action movies. The two jobs represent no conflict for him: He drives.

As played by Ryan Gosling , he is in the tradition of two iconic heroes of the 1960s: Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Alain Delon in “ Le Samourai .” He has no family, no history and seemingly few emotions. Whatever happened to him drove any personality deep beneath the surface. He is an existential hero, I suppose, defined entirely by his behavior.

That would qualify him as the hero of a mindless action picture, all CGI and crashes and mayhem. “Drive” is more of an elegant exercise in style, and its emotions may be hidden but they run deep. Sometimes a movie will make a greater impact by not trying too hard. The enigma of the driver is surrounded by a rich gallery of supporting actors who are clear about their hopes and fears, and who have either reached an accommodation with the Driver, or not. Here is still another illustration of the old Hollywood noir principle that a movie lives its life not through its hero, but within its shadows.

The Driver lives somewhere (somehow that’s improbable, since we expect him to descend full-blown into the story). His neighbor is Irene, played by Carey Mulligan , that template of vulnerability. She has a young son, Benecio (Kaden Leos), who seems to stir the Driver’s affection, although he isn’t the effusive type. They grow warm, but in a week, her husband, Standard ( Oscar Isaac ), is released from prison. Against our expectations, Standard isn’t jealous or hostile about the new neighbor, but sizes him up, sees a professional and quickly pitches a $1 million heist idea. That will provide the engine for the rest of the story, and as Irene and Benecio are endangered, the Driver reveals deep feelings and loyalties indeed, and undergoes enormous risk at little necessary benefit to himself.

The film by the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (“ Bronson “), based on a novel by James Sallis , peoples its story with characters who bring lifetimes onto the screen, in contrast to the Driver, who brings as little as possible. Ron Perlman seems to be a big-time operator working out of a small-time front, a pizzeria in a strip mall. Albert Brooks , not the slightest bit funny, plays a producer of the kinds of B movies the Driver does stunt driving for — and also has a sideline in crime. These people are ruthless.

More benign is Bryan Cranston , as the kind of man you know the Driver must have behind him, a genius at auto repairs, restoration and supercharging.

I mentioned CGI earlier. “Drive” seems to have little of it. Most of the stunt driving looks real to me, with cars of weight and heft, rather than animated impossible fantasies. The entire film, in fact, seems much more real than the usual action-crime-chase concoctions we’ve grown tired of. Here is a movie with respect for writing, acting and craft. It has respect for knowledgable moviegoers. There were moments when I was reminded of “ Bullitt ,” which was so much better than the films it inspired. The key thing you want to feel, during a chase scene, is involvement in the purpose of the chase. You have to care. Too often we’re simply witnessing technology.

Maybe there was another reason I thought of “Bullitt.” Ryan Gosling is a charismatic actor, as Steve McQueen was. He embodies presence and sincerity. Ever since his chilling young Jewish neo-Nazi in “ The Believer ” (2001), he has shown a gift for finding arresting, powerful characters. An actor who can fall in love with a love doll and make us believe it, as he did in “ Lars and the Real Girl ” (2007), can achieve just about anything. “Drive” looks like one kind of movie in the ads, and it is that kind of movie. It is also a rebuke to most of the movies it looks like.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Carey Mulligan as Irene
Oscar Isaac as Standard
Bryan Cranston as Shannon
Albert Brooks as Bernie
Ryan Gosling as Driver
Ron Perlman as Nino
Hossein Amini

Based on the novel by

James Sallis

Directed by

Nicolas Winding Refn

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Movie Review | 'Drive'

Fasten Your Seat Belts, the Chevy Is Taking Off

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By A. O. SCOTT

Sept. 15, 2011

A long time ago, as a young filmmaker besotted with the hard-boiled pleasures of classic Hollywood, Jean-Luc Godard claimed that all anyone needed to make a film was a girl and a gun . In his new movie, “Drive,” Nicolas Winding Refn, in thrall to a later Hollywood tradition, tests out a slightly different formula. In this case all you need is a guy and a car.

In the brilliant opening sequence the formula seems to work beautifully. The car is, of all things, a late-model silver Chevy Impala, the kind of generic, functional ride you might rent at the airport on a business trip. The guy is Ryan Gosling — his character has no known proper name, and is variously referred to as “the driver,” “the kid” and “him” — and to watch him steer through Los Angeles at night is to watch a virtuoso at work. Behind the wheel of a getaway car after an uninteresting, irrelevant and almost botched robbery, the driver glides past obstacles and shakes off pursuers, slowing down as often as he accelerates and maintaining a steady pulse rate even as the soundtrack winds up the tension to heart attack levels.

The virtuosity on display is also the director’s, of course, and that, for better and for worse, is pretty much the point of “Drive,” the coolest movie around and therefore the latest proof that cool is never cool enough. Mr. Winding Refn is a Danish-born director (“Bronson,” “Valhalla Rising,” the “Pusher” trilogy), some of whose earlier films have inspired ardent, almost cultish devotion in cinephile circles.

His own love of movies can hardly be doubted, and there’s nothing wrong with his taste. He likes the stripped-down highway movies of the 1960s and ’70s — the kind that Quentin Tarantino celebrated in “Death Proof” — and also the atmospheric masculine melancholy associated with Michael Mann . You might also catch a hint of Paul Schrader’s “American Gigolo” and, with respect to the story rather than to the visual style, a whole bunch of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone westerns.

Mr. Gosling’s driver, like Mr. Eastwood’s Man With No Name , is a solitary figure with no background or connections but with skills that defy explanation. In addition to his getaway gigs, he drives stunt cars for movies — the source of a witty trompe l’oeil sequence early in the film — and might have a future on the racing circuit.

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A Twisty, Brutal 'Drive' For A Level-Headed Hero

David Edelstein

The Fast Lane : A Hollywood stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) earns a little extra by driving getaway cars by night. Richard Foreman/FilmDistrict hide caption

The hero of Drive is called "Driver" because that's what he does, and in a thriller this self-consciously existential, what he does is who he is.

He's played by Ryan Gosling as a kind of anti-blowhard. He's taciturn, watchful, cool. He works as a mechanic and sometimes a Hollywood driving stuntman. He also drives getaway cars with astonishing proficiency and a computer-like knowledge of L.A. surface streets, holding a matchstick between his teeth as if to keep his mouth from moving, and his feelings under wraps.

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Genre: Crime, Action, Drama
Running Time: 100 minutes

Rated R for disturbing content and some language

But Driver down deep is one of God's Loneliest Men. He needs someone to love, to risk everything for, to give him a reason to drive.

Drive was a sensation at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where they really go for existential thrillers, and this recalls such arty French favorites as Walter Hill's The Driver and Michael Mann's Thief . The ambience is floating, the characters off to the side of the frame leaving lots of empty space.

What distinguishes Drive from its predecessors is the ultra-graphic violence — the sort that gore lovers call "wet." After each shooting, stabbing and stomping, you won't be saying, "Is he dead?"

Watch Clips

'Sorry About The Noise'

Credit: FilmDistrict

'West On 7th Street Bridge'

'He's A Good Guy'

The director is Nicolas Winding Refn, the Dane who made, among other films, a fast, tense crime trilogy called Pusher . He's a crackerjack craftsman. In an early heist sequence, Driver uses his knowledge of the urban maze to evade both cruisers and 'copters, and it's a tight, twisty piece of staging.

But Refn aims higher. He's said he's interested in the dark side of heroism, the way "righteous adherence to a code" can shift into the realm of the psychotic. I think he's more interested in punkish shock and splatter, and that he's just the guy to take Hollywood action to the next level: slick, amoral and unbelievably vicious.

The movie is cruel, but it isn't cold. Gosling lets emotion gradually bleed through Driver's impassive mask, and he becomes intensely likable. He has a tender relationship with Shannon, his manager in all three arenas — auto-repair, film stunts and crime --who's played by Breaking Bad 's Bryan Cranston in his third big movie of the last three months.

And boy, has Cranston earned that success. Shannon is a sweet, gimpy, luckless man who dreams of building a racecar to be driven by — who else? — Driver. For funding, he goes to Bernie Rose, a creepily inexpressive businessman played by, believe it or not, Albert Brooks.

Love thy neighbor: Our hero's one weakness is his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), with whom he imagines building a life — until harsh realities intrude. Richard Foreman Jr/FilmDistrict hide caption

Love thy neighbor: Our hero's one weakness is his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), with whom he imagines building a life — until harsh realities intrude.

How dirty is Bernie? It's well into Drive before you find out — and maybe an hour until the industrial-strength splatter. In the meantime, Driver becomes involved, platonically, with his neighbor, a pretty young mother named Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her lonely little boy. After some happy montages — ending with Driver giving up crime, hoping against hope for a life with Irene — the woman's husband suddenly gets out of prison, so that ends that pipe dream. Worse, the ex-con turns out to owe money to thugs who threaten to kill his wife and son if he doesn't rob a pawnshop for them. And so Driver is driven to make one last drive.

As you might have gathered from this synopsis, Drive is ridiculously contrived. But it works — and works you over. The carnage is so horrible that people at my screening cried out. And to think that in the middle of much of it is Albert Brooks. There's something magical about his performance. You can taste his pleasure in playing his cards close to the vest, in not — as in his own movies — having to work so hard to be crazily, humiliatingly vulnerable. Let everyone else, including the audience, writhe.

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Drive Reviews

Director Nicolas Winding Refn infuses an amalgam of several standard stories with an unassailable armor of cool to protect the indefatigable loneliness at its center.

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Drive is basically the coolest movie ever. Its dreamlike, electronic soundtrack -- perfect for travel at night -- layers meaningful messages into a violent fairy tale about an unconventional hero.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

A patient, Jean-Pierre Melville-esque character study with flourishes of action. But it's more about atmosphere than adrenaline.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 8, 2023

Refn affirms his talents as a genre filmmaker and indulges in excesses and clichés reminiscent of '70s and '80s productions. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 4, 2022

Underneath the crafty and stylish surface lies a fairly simple and conventional action thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 20, 2022

One of the most iconic and stylish films of the twenty-first century

Full Review | Jun 2, 2022

...with no end of great, if ludicrous, fight choreography and stunt work, it is a guilty pleasure for action fans par excellence...

Full Review | Feb 24, 2022

Action buffed down to its essence and serving the purpose of an emotional reaction rather than a strictly visceral one

Full Review | Jan 10, 2022

Working from Hossain Amini's compelling, "driving" narrative script, director Refn delivers a masterclass in mood creation, playing with camera angles, shadows, film speed and sound to keep the audience fully engrossed.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 8, 2021

Drive's bravura opening highlighted that there's more than one way to execute a nail-biting car chase, especially when operating on an indie budget.

Full Review | Sep 20, 2021

Nicolas Winding Refn had an extremely distinct vision and saw something different in rom-com heartthrob Ryan Gosling. And when those two things collided, damn, was it cool.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

The movie looks fantastic and is still the best-looking example of the 2010s neon-aesthetic renaissance that it helped kick off.

Full Review | May 5, 2021

Poetic with its minimalism, excessive in its violence, and artistic with its presentation.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 30, 2020

Mulligan has made quite the career for herself in highly acclaimed yet frequently under-seen films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 6, 2020

A violent yet stylish film that is very well made

Full Review | Jun 29, 2020

In 'Drive', a film directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, we find an ingenious mix of the best of road cinema from the 70s and neo-noir criminal intrigue. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 24, 2020

Nicolas Winding Refn demonstrates an incredible understanding for the neon-infused loneliness of L.A. and its crime world underpinnings.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 4, 2020

This story affected me. I'll be watching Drive for the rest of my life, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a disturbing and romantic ride.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2020

It was a surprising Action Crime Drama that totally has you in the end of your seat anticipating on what will happen next.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 11, 2020

Calculating. Methodical. High gloss. Slick. Polished. Drive is the neo-noir thriller of the year.

Full Review | Nov 26, 2019

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Film Review: ‘Drive,’ Starring Ryan Gosling, Delivers Fresh Guilty-Pleasure Thrills

"Drive" takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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The villain in “ Drive ” admits he used to produce movies — sexy ’80s action pics, to be exact. “One critic called them ‘European,'” the sleazeball brags. Now he’s starring in one: a sleek, retro-styled B-movie that benefits immensely from the aloof, virtually nihilistic edge Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (“Bronson”) brings to the party. Starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stuntman/getaway driver, “Drive” takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process. Serious-actor cast, plus pic’s selection in competition at Cannes, should lend prestige to the Sept. 16 domestic release.

After serving up a pair of intense, emotionally draining perfs in “Blue Valentine” and “All Good Things,” Gosling swings to the other extreme with “Drive,” channeling Alain Delon’s cipher-like hitman from “Le Samourai” — a cool-as-ice model that conveniently allows screenwriters to forgo the requisite backstory when creating compassionate-criminal types. The key to such one-dimensional characters is that they live by a rigorous code of conduct, and Gosling’s unnamed Driver is no exception.

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By sticking to his own set of rules, Driver excels at his job, which amounts to evading cops by night, only to play one the following day on set. Gosling is chillingly stoic in either context, hardly breaking a sweat in the film’s buckle-up beginning scene. In fact, thesp betrays no emotion until the third time his character encounters pretty next-door neighbor Irene ( Carey Mulligan ) and her young son, Benicio (Kaden Leos). Only then does Driver crack a smile, offering the pair a high-speed tour along the Los Angeles River’s cement culverts.

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Romantic as their outing proves, Irene isn’t exactly single. Benicio’s dad, Standard (Oscar Isaac), comes home from jail a week later, enlisting Driver in a ploy that involves stealing a million dollars for mostly honorable reasons. Things go bad, blood and brains are splattered about with sickening glee, and Driver finds his chivalrous intentions put to the test as those behind the botched heist threaten to harm Irene and Benicio, whose protection evidently matters enough to Driver that he’s willing to risk his life.

Adapted by Hossein Amini (best known for “The Wings of the Dove” and other highbrow literary fare) from James Sallis’ Los Angeles-set novel, “Drive” doesn’t quite know how to handle the character vacuum at its core, but compensates by surrounding its protag with a colorful supporting ensemble. There’s Bryan Cranston (“Breaking Bad”) as the surrogate father who supplies Driver his wheels; Ron Perlman as a ruthless big shot running schemes from his strip-mall pizza joint; and Albert Brooks, cast deliciously against type, as the aforementioned producer-turned-crime-boss. On the female front, vampy “Mad Men” redhead Christina Hendricks makes an all-too-brief appearance, while Mulligan, though undeniably sweet, seems too wholesome for what would typically be the pic’s femme-fatale role.

Like Quentin Tarantino, Refn is an exploitation-movie junkie, so his cinematic references mirror ’70s and ’80s cult faves like “To Live and Die in L.A.” more than the spare, unforgiving noir novels and films Sallis had in mind. Such questionable influences can be felt from the neon-bright opening credits to Refn’s retro music choices — a mix of tension-ratcheting synthesizer tones and catchy club anthems — that collectively give the film its consistent tone.

Whereas most muscle-car action pics are visually and narratively flat, however, “Drive” displays stunning style. With its spare storytelling economy, this is the sort of film that would launch a career, if only it were Refn’s debut, rather than his eighth feature. Still, it does mark Refn’s first for-hire Hollywood production, giving him the chance to work with the likes of Steven Soderbergh’s go-to composer, Cliff Martinez, and Bryan Singer’s trusted d.p., Newton Thomas Sigel, whose high-contrast widescreen framing puts a harsh new edge on east L.A. locations.

Among a host of impressive setpieces, the most remarkable is a white-knuckle car chase that once again reminds how scarce fancy driving has gotten onscreen, deservedly earning a round of enthusiastic applause from the Cannes crowd. (Though dozens of drivers are credited, Gosling did a number of his own stunts.)

Still, it’s surprising that a film called “Drive” doesn’t feature more driving. Amini’s script barely explores Driver’s status as a stuntman, offering only a thin connection between his high-stakes day job and equally dangerous private life (in the form of a prosthetic mask he dons in the film’s brutal score-settling finale). What the character lacks in psychology, he compensates for through action and iconic costuming. Come Halloween, don’t be surprised to see fans dressed as Driver, wearing a white satin racing jacket with a giant gold scorpion on the back. “Drive” is fetishistic like that, reveling in such details as the growl of a GTO engine or the creak of Gosling’s gloves, and should go a long way to boost the profiles of both its director and star.

Production: A FilmDistrict release presented in association with Bold Films and OddLot Entertainment of a Marc Platt/Motel Movies production. (International sales: Sierra/Affinity, Beverly Hills.) Produced by Marc E. Platt, Adam Siegel, Gigi Pritzker, Michael Litvak, John Palermo. Executive producers, David Lancaster, Gary Michael Walters, William Lischak, Linda McDonough, Jeffrey Stott. Co-producers, Garrick Dion, Jonathan Oakes, James Smith, Frank Capra III. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Screenplay, Hossein Amini, based on the book by James Sallis.
Crew: Camera (color, widescreen); editor, Matthew Newman; music, Cliff Martinez; music supervisors, Brian McNelis, Eric Craig; production designer, Beth Mickle; art director, Christopher Tandon; set decorator, Lisa Sessions Morgan; costume designer, Erin Benach; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), Robert Eber; sound designers, Lou Bender, Victor Ray Ennis; re-recording mixers, Robert Fernandez, Dave Patterson; stunt coordinator, Darrin M. Prescott; special effects coordinator, Jimmy Lorimer; associate producer, Joe Fineman; assistant director, Frank Capra III; casting, Mindy Marin. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 19, 2011. Running time: 100 MIN.
With: Driver - Ryan Gosling Irene - Carey Mulligan Shannon - Bryan Cranston Bernie Rose - Albert Brooks Standard - Oscar Isaac Nino - Ron Perlman Blanche - Christina Hendricks Benicio - Kaden Leos

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‘drive’: cannes 2011 review.

The arty Danish fast-cars-and-crime thriller, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, should be promotable to good box office results from both discerning and popcorn audiences come September.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Movie review: ‘Drive’

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“Drive” is a Los Angeles neo-noir, a neon-lit crime story made with lots of visual style. It’s a film in love with both traditional noir mythology and ultra-modern violence, a combination that is not ideal.

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director award at Cannes, and it’s easy to see why this tale of an emotionless wheelman (Ryan Gosling) who lives to drive and makes a rare stab at human connection with a fetching neighbor took the prize. Impeccably shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, “Drive” always looks dressed to kill. Making fine use of Los Angeles locations, particularly the lonely downtown streets around the L.A. River, “Drive” has a slick, highly romanticized pastel look calculated to win friends and influence people.

Less user-friendly is the film’s disturbing violence. “Drive” doesn’t spend a lot of time on mayhem, but what does get put on screen is intense, unsettling and increasingly grotesque and graphic as the film goes on.

For fans of director Refn, known among chaos aficionados for made-in-Europe violent fare like “The Pusher” trilogy and “Bronson,” this is bloody business as usual. But the mayhem here so clashes with the high style and traditionalism of the rest of the film that when the bloodletting goes into overdrive, so to speak, it throws you out of the picture, diluting the mood rather than enhancing it.

Certainly there could be no more familiar character to movie fans than the film’s protagonist, so iconic he’s reminiscent of Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic “Le Samourai” and as written by Hossein Amini from the James Sallis novel so self-consciously mythologized he doesn’t even have a name.

Coolly played by Gosling, the driver is a monosyllabic loner with a monotone voice, a toothpick in his mouth, and a fondness for a silver racing jacket with a giant yellow scorpion on the back. By day he works in a garage on Reseda Boulevard run by hard luck Shannon (“Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston) and does stunt driving for the movies. Once the sun goes down, he drives getaway cars for criminal types.

“There are 100,000 streets in this city,” the driver says, echoing the famous “there are 8 million stories in the naked city” line of yore. Just tell him where and when to pick you up — and don’t even think about making him wait more than five minutes — and he promises to ferry you to safety. For a price.

“Drive” opens with what might be its most successful, least violent set piece, a getaway from a robbery choreographed to quietly insistent techno music by Johnny Jewel. As he plays cat and mouse with L.A.’s finest, the driver reveals himself to be a highly proficient, emotionless technician with nerves of tempered steel. When the man pulls on his leather driving gloves, it’s best to get out of the way.

Trying to keep as low a profile as possible, the driver lives in an apartment building next to MacArthur Park and shops in the picturesque Big 6 supermarket nearby. To say that he is closed off to all forms of human emotion is putting it very mildly indeed.

But, hey, wouldn’t you know it, living right down the hall from the driver is Irene (Carey Mulligan, underutilized), an attractive young woman who does have a name. She also has a young son named Benicio (Kaden Leos) who the driver inexplicably takes a fatherly interest in. Whatever this film’s strengths, psychological motivation is not one of them.

Before this platonic idyll can get out of first gear, Irene’s husband Standard (the gifted Oscar Isaac) comes back from the prison where he’s been conveniently warehoused and the driver prepares to retreat into his mythic shell.

But wait. Standard comes home to trouble with some bad guys, bad guys who make the mistake of threatening Irene and young Benicio. Ever the knight errant, the driver volunteers his help, but everything starts to go wrong in ways that lead to all that bloodshed.

Though many aspects of “Drive” are, for better or worse, intentionally familiar, there is one element that is different, and that is Albert Brooks’ performance as Bernie Rose, a genial but dangerous criminal of the driver’s acquaintance. The actor brings a fine air of scornful, eccentric menace to the role. When people die in his presence, it’s not laughter they’re dying of.

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Summary Drive is the story of a Hollywood stunt driver by day, a loner by nature, who moonlights as a top-notch getaway driver-for-hire in the criminal underworld. He finds himself a target for some of LA's most dangerous men after agreeing to aid the husband of his beautiful neighbor, Irene. When the job goes dangerously awry, the only way he c ... Read More

Directed By : Nicolas Winding Refn

Written By : Hossein Amini, James Sallis

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Common Sense Says
Parents Say 17 Reviews
Kids Say 57 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Crime drama is exciting, well-made, and shockingly violent.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 18+?

This movie starts off slowly and quietly, but soon there are astonishing amounts

The main character doesn't swear, but other characters do frequently, using word

Two or three topless women are on view for a long time during a nightclub scene.

The main character doesn't drink or smoke, but supporting characters are occasio

Some products appear or are mentioned as background. A Coca-Cola sign is shown m

Any Positive Content?

"The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry" seems to the best way to descr

The main character leads a life of crime, and his only good deed involves more c

Violence & Scariness

This movie starts off slowly and quietly, but soon there are astonishing amounts of bloody, gory, shocking violence. A woman's head is blown off with a shotgun. The main character beats up a man and stomps on his head until it squashes like a pumpkin. He slaps and threatens a woman. He also threatens a man with a claw hammer and a bullet. Also slicing and stabbing, shooting, murders, and characters beaten up and bloodied. A small boy isn't exactly shown to be in danger, but in one scene, he displays a bullet that some bad guys have given him as a warning.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

The main character doesn't swear, but other characters do frequently, using words like "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," "a--hole," "hell," and more. Characters also use the middle finger gesture and racial slurs like "chink" and "kike."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two or three topless women are on view for a long time during a nightclub scene. The main characters kiss, even though the woman is already married. Some minor flirting and/or innuendo.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The main character doesn't drink or smoke, but supporting characters are occasionally seen smoking cigarettes or drinking socially. One key character mentions several types of drugs -- offering them to the main character -- but they're never shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Some products appear or are mentioned as background. A Coca-Cola sign is shown more than once in a pizza parlor. A scene takes place at a Denny's restaurant, and the name of the character's car, a Chevy Impala, is mentioned several times over a police scanner.

Positive Messages

"The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry" seems to the best way to describe the movie's message, such that it is, and it's not very hopeful. The main character upsets his stripped-down, carefully planned life and opens his heart just a bit but finds that it results in nothing but pain and violence.

Positive Role Models

The main character leads a life of crime, and his only good deed involves more crime. He also falls in love with a married woman, and all of his actions result in violence.

Parents need to know that this superbly made crime drama (which won the prestigious Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival) starts off quietly but eventually contains shocking amounts of violence, including a woman's head getting blown apart by a shotgun blast and the main character stomping a man's head until it squashes like a pumpkin. Language is also very strong, with multiple uses of "f--k," "s--t," and "p---y." Several women are topless in one long scene, and the two main characters have a romantic relationship even though she's already married. The main character is a criminal without many redeeming qualities, but he's still fascinating. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (17)
Kids say (57)

Based on 17 parent reviews

What's the Story?

The "driver" ( Ryan Gosling ) drives stunt cars for the movies by day -- and by night he hires out his services for criminals who need getaway cars. He works with hard-luck-but-cheerful mechanic Shannon ( Bryan Cranston ) on both jobs. He's incredibly skilled, lives a quiet, simple, Zen-like life, and has all his bases covered -- until he meets his pretty neighbor, Irene ( Carey Mulligan ), and her young son, Benicio (Kaden Leos). When Irene's husband is released from prison, the driver reluctantly agrees to help him on a job that will get him out of debt and out of trouble. But everything goes wrong, and the fallout leads back to a pair of sinister thugs ( Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman ). Can the driver steer a way out of this mess?

Is It Any Good?

Danish-born director Nicolas Winding Refn isn't exactly a household name, but he might be after DRIVE; he might also elicit comparisons to Quentin Tarantino , which would be entirely deserved. Drive is steeped in movies, especially moody 1980s films by Ridley Scott , Michael Mann , and William Friedkin , as well as any genre films about stoic, secretive heroes -- but at the same time it feels like something new. Its style prevails over its substance, but what style!

But that's not meant to disparage the film's substance; clearly Refn adores actors, and he finds many tiny moments of warmth, adoration, and humor within the film's steely surface. In one impeccably framed scene, the driver and the girl merely smile at one another, hinting at untold depths. Every actor delivers his or her best work, especially the colorful villains and sidekicks. Only the movie's extreme, shocking violence could get in the way of total adoration for this sublime piece of genre work.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the impact of the movie's extreme violence . How does it compare to what you see in horror movies? Which is more upsetting? Why?

Is the main character a "hero"? Are viewers meant to find him sympathetic even though he's a criminal? What makes "bad guy" characters compelling?

What is the movie's attitude toward women? What are the female characters like? Are they three-dimensional?

Is the little boy in this movie ever in true danger, or is the danger only suggested? What's the difference?

Movie Details

In theaters : September 16, 2011
On DVD or streaming : January 30, 2012
Cast : Bryan Cranston , Carey Mulligan , Ryan Gosling
Director : Nicolas Winding Refn
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : FilmDistrict
Genre : Drama
Run time : 100 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong brutal bloody violence, language and some nudity
Last updated : April 22, 2024

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Trending on RT

Ryan Gosling On Drive : This Is My Superhero Movie

The star talks movie mythology, his childhood obsession with rambo, and why he loves working with director nicolas winding refn..

Thanks to the unlikely combination of valiantly dispersing New York street fights and starring in one of the year’s best movies (hint: it’s not Blue Valentine ), Ryan Gosling has not only emerged as movies’ man of the moment — he’s also, at long last, apparently comfortable in becoming a genuine (and not just for The Notebook ) star.

In Drive , director Nicolas Winding Refn’s ( Bronson , Valhalla Rising ) neo-noir thriller, Gosling plays an enigmatic outsider known only as “Driver,” a Hollywood stunt jockey who moonlights as a getaway wheel man for a local crime boss. Co-starring Carey Mulligan and Albert Brooks, the film is a genre piece that evokes a long-gone era of car movies, with obvious antecedents like Walter Hill’s The Driver and William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. mixed with the dirty neon of a little-seen modern Los Angeles (Thom Anderson would approve ) and set to a pulsing electronic score from Cliff Martinez and Johnny Jewel.

We met with Gosling — who looked like he’d just stepped straight off the electric pastel poster for his movie — for a chat about Drive and working with Refn.

RT: You said that since everyone’s been doing a superhero movie you thought, “Why not do one?” Have you been approached to do superhero movies?

Ryan Gosling: Yeah.

Many times?

Mmm-hmm, yep.

But Drive ended up being the superhero movie for you?

This is the one. I wanted to make this one. I didn’t always know I was gonna get to make it, but I did.

What was it about the film? Had you read the script when Hugh Jackman and director Neil Marshall were attached to make it?

I think that might be the original one I read. I read a few drafts. I read one as well where he wasn’t a stunt driver at all, which was a newer draft — maybe that’s the one Hugh Jackman had; I’m not sure exactly. Basically when I read it, in trying to figure out who would do something like this, the only way to make sense of this is that this is a guy that’s seen too many movies, and he’s started to confuse his life for a film. He’s lost in the mythology of Hollywood and he’s become an amalgamation of all the characters that he admires.

I could relate to that because back when I was a kid, when I first saw First Blood , it kind of put a spell on me and I thought I was Rambo. I went to school the next day and I put all these knives in my Fisher-Price Houdini kit and I f**king threw them at all these kids at recess, and I got suspended. I didn’t hit any kids and I didn’t hurt anybody, thank god, but my parents were like, “You can’t watch violent movies anymore.” They were careful about what they showed me because [movies] really did have a big impact on me. They said I could only watch Bible movies and National Geographic films, but those are really f**king violent, you know [ laughs ] — but I could see where they were going.

So I connected to the film that way — in that films can cast spells. And cars can as well, because you get in a car, and you get out, and you don’t remember the trip, you know? There’s also something about cars where you can really put your identity in the driver’s seat: no one’s watching you, so you don’t have to be self-conscious — you can just watch. I can put a kind of spell on you. So the idea of movie mythology and the idea of the car being a vehicle to take you in to someone’s subconscious felt like there was a possibility for a kind of a superhero film, about a guy who wants to be a superhero.

On a side note, I always wanted to see a violent John Hughes movie. I love John Hughes, but if there was a head smashing in Pretty in Pink , then it would be perfect. [ Laughs ]

How did this recall a John Hughes movie for you?

It became that once we started thinking. It wasn’t that initially. The original script was much more authentic to Los Angeles gang culture and the reality; it was more realistic. We wanted this to be more of a fairytale, like a Grimm brothers fairytale, so we had to change it. In the process of writing it we were talking about movies and for some reason we ended up talking about John Hughes movies and, like, Purple Rain . There’s something about this character: he has cinematic ideas of romance, and he lives in a fantasy. And that’s what John Hughes movies are — they’re just all cotton candy and champagne. The movie needed that, but it also needed a little blood on the cotton candy, to give it balance. We used that as a guide.

You got to personally choose Nicolas as the director — a guy who also explored the blurring of character and mythology recently in Bronson and Valhalla Rising . What was it about him that made you feel he was right for this film?

He fetishizes the frame. Everything in the frame has to physically turn him on, and if it doesn’t, he won’t shoot it. So he makes very personal films, because he only shoots what he wants to see. His movies have a real identity, and he won’t repeat himself. They’re movies that you want to see in a movie theater. You don’t wanna see them at home. You know, in Valhalla Rising , when One Eye cuts the guts out of his friend and shows him his own guts, and everyone starts freaking out and hitting each other and laughing and they don’t know how to feel — you wanna be in a theater to experience that. I wanted this movie to be a film you wanted to see in a movie theater, and I think those are the kinds of films that he makes. I also feel like he and I were sharing the same dream, and kind of continue to — so I could fight for his inability to make anything that’s not personal, because it’s also personal to me.

Drive opens in US theaters this week, September 23 in the UK, and October 27 in Australia.

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Movie Review: Drive (2011)

Mark Zhuravsky
Movie Reviews
7 responses
--> September 16, 2011

The Driver (Ryan Gosling) has no need for a name. He embodies his job description — a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. Life outside of the 1973 Chevy Malibu, his vehicle of choice, is anonymous. That is, until Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall, walks into the Driver’s life. Irene is a single mother, caring for her son while Standard (Oscar Issac of “ Sucker Punch “) languishes in prison. But Standard is due to be out soon enough, and while Driver plays father figure for several lovely days, the quiet man embodied with moments of precise rage by Gosling will soon be thrust into an increasingly convoluted criminal scheme. His survival is improbable, leaving many grisly scenes in its wake but the Driver never slows his pace, or lets down his guard.

Add this author to the quickly growing cult of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive , a genre picture that is as unstoppable as its main character, furious and gentle in equal parts, a complete triumph of style over substance and yet not insubstantial. The Onion’s AV Club deemed it “retro genre heaven” and it’s tempting to agree — but it’s also an American thriller filtered through the mind of a European fan, the pacing distinctly Refn-esque. There is a fascination with details, like the Driver’s clothes becoming more and more blood splattered as he racks up a kill count. There is the man himself, almost mute and just a tidbit less imposing than the One Eye of “ Valhalla Rising .” The fact that Gosling can stir up genuine tension despite his pretty-boy looks is one of this movie’s many victories.

The men that come in conflict with Driver over a botched crime scheme are Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks — imagine if Hank Scorpio wasn’t a cartoon villain but a toned down career criminal) and Nino (Ron Perlman, in full-on gangster mode and granted one defining stand-out scene). Rose is the brains and Nino the muscle and yet the two are notably human, hardly caricatures or bland, faceless villains. By sheer bad luck, Rose happens to be the primary investor in a race car that Gosling would have been set to drive. Rose is bolstered by Shannon (Bryan Cranston), a permanently down-on-his-luck mechanic who owns a garage that Driver occasionally toils in between transporting criminals and crashing cars in the movies. Cranston’s Shannon is a sad-sack case who doesn’t realize he’s doomed from the on-set and a late scene with Cranston and Brooks is startlingly sad.

Is it wrong to characterize Drive as an action movie? Maybe insofar as present action templates are concerned — this film is dead-set against trading silence for overwhelming noise. Refn understands the value of the moments before and after the onslaught and milks them with merciless efficiency. It serves the film better than you can imagine, aided with another excellent Cliff Martinez score, playing like a winking Tangerine Dream cover band. Evocative and exact lighting by Newton Thomas Sigel (Bryan Singer’s DP of choice) solidifies a key moment in an elevator as one of the year’s best stand-alone scenes.

There’s a lot to like and love about Drive and perhaps that’s why this review reads more like a best-of compilation than straight-forward criticism. To fall under the spell of the film is to be reminded why you love movies in the first place — in part because the films you love are ones you can watch with friends, eying their facial expressions like you’re nursing an addiction, the satisfaction of reliving the same moments that floored you through them. Drive is a film that spins a little substance into movie magic, and invites you to bask in it (while sneaking in deliriously over-the-top violence and well-executed car chases). It’s the total package; not a perfect film, but in a way an inimitable triumph — a unique coalition of director, actors, and crew.

Tagged: driver , mafia , neighbor , novel adaptation

The best of the five boroughs is now represented. Brooklyn in the house! I'm a hardworking film writer, blogger, and former co-host of "It's No Timecop" podcast ! Find me on Twitter @markzhur .

Movie Review: The Last Exorcism Part 2 (2013) Movie Review: Masquerade (2012) Movie Review: Sightseers (2012) Movie Review: Iron Man 3 (2013) Movie Review: Screwed (2011) Movie Review: Looper (2012) Movie Review: The Grey (2012)

'Movie Review: Drive (2011)' have 7 comments

September 18, 2011 @ 10:31 pm Tyler's Comment

man, gosling has steadily gotten better and better at this acting thing. although he doesn’t say much in this particular movie his presence is riveting.

September 19, 2011 @ 3:18 am VanSpeedster

Awesome use of soundtrack through out. The rest of the movie not so awesome.

September 20, 2011 @ 12:30 am Arc Games

Albert Brooks owned the show. Whoda thunk Brooks as a gangster..?

September 20, 2011 @ 1:34 pm Baywater

In a nutshell, Drive is a very ‘crafty’ film with too much downtime between anything of substance happening.

September 22, 2011 @ 2:35 am SomeGuy

Great review for a great movie, Mark.

September 22, 2011 @ 3:44 pm Hecklan

Good overall movie but it lacked that epic finale it was yearning for. It kinda ended on a “hohum” note.

September 30, 2011 @ 10:58 am Wes

Last act left me hanging. Pretty good flick up to that though.

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Buckle up for the existential bloodbath of Drive , a brilliant piece of nasty business that races on a B-movie track until it switches to the dizzying fuel of undiluted creativity. Damn, it’s good. You can get buzzed just from the fumes coming off this wild thing.

That’s Ryan Gosling at the wheel. He plays Driver (I told you it was existential), a Hollywood stunt racer who moonlights as a getaway wheel man. Gosling is dynamite in the role, silent, stoic, radiating mystery. Driver isn’t into planning robberies. He doesn’t carry a gun. “I drive,” he says. And he proves it in an opening chase scene so thrillingly intense and cleanly edited it will give you whiplash.

Sharing Drive ‘s metaphorical wheel is Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, a sensation on the Euro art-house circuit with the bruising Pusher trilogy, Valhalla Rising and Bronson . Refn makes his Hollywood debut with Drive without putting his soul or his balls on the auction block. Refn is a virtuoso, blending tough and tender with such uncanny skill that he deservedly won the Best Director prize at Cannes.

Drive was once intended as a fast-and-furious blockbuster for Hugh Jackman. Then Gosling stepped in and met Refn. As the actor drove the director home, the radio blasted REO Speedwagon, and Refn began rocking out. That was it. Their movie would evoke what it is to drive around listening to music and trying to feel something.

Drive is a genre movie. So watch for comparisons, especially to films of the Seventies and Eighties that pulsate with a synth score. Think early Michael Mann ( Thief ) and William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. Driver is a loner, suggesting Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï . Like Alan Ladd in George Stevens’ classic Western Shane , the loner meets a woman, Irene (Carey Mulligan), with a young son (Kaden Leos). She also has an ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac), so Driver must hold in his urges until, well, he can’t.

Editor’s picks

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Chances are you could play the name-that-influence game for days, and I’d happily join you. But that’d be a disservice to Drive , since Refn, like Quentin Tarantino, has the gift of assimilating film history into a fresh take carrying his DNA. Take his fetishistic eye for detail, from Driver’s toothpick to the satin bomber jacket with a gold scorpion on its back.

Refn is wicked good with actors, paring down the dialogue in the script by Hossein Amini (deftly adapted from James Sallis’ novel) so that the backstory must play out on their faces. Challenge met. Gosling mesmerizes in a role a lesser actor could tip into absurdity. Bryan Cranston, on fire with Breaking Bad , brings wit and compassion to Driver’s fatherly mentor. And Mulligan is glorious, inhabiting a role that is barely there and making it resonant and whole. Prepare to be blown away by Albert Brooks, cast way against type as crime boss Bernie Rose. Brooks, an iconically sharp comic voice, has toyed with villainy before (see Out of Sight ), but never like this. Brooks’ performance, veined with dark humor and chilling menace (watch him with a blade), deserves to have Oscar calling.

Violence drives Drive . A heist gone bad involving a femme fatale (an incendiary cameo from Mad Men ‘s Christina Hendricks) puts blood on the walls. Ditto a pounding Driver delivers at a strip club. An elevator scene with Driver, Irene and an assassin is time-capsule sexy and scary. In league with camera whiz Newton Thomas Sigel and composer Cliff Martinez, Refn creates a fever dream that sucks you in. Or maybe you’ll hate it. Drive is a polarizer. It’s also pure cinema, a grenade of image and sound ready to blow.

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Drive, review

Drive, starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, is a masterpiece of surface over depth says Sukhdev Sandhu.

18 cert, 100 min; dir: Nicolas Winding Refn, starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan

Hey, guys! Hey, man-boys! Like watching movies with cars thumping into each other? Stabby-stab movies where terse chaps stamp on their enemies’ heads over and over again until they’ve turned into squelchy puddles? Movies where the women have nothing to do except coo starry-eyed at every Tom, Dick and sociopathic Harry? Drive is here to cater to all your fantasies.

Am I making the film sound a bit Neanderthal or unreconstructed? Don’t worry. It’s made by Nicolas Winding Refn, that Danish dude who swore on breakfast telly the other day. It’s also really moody, waits a while before the flesh-ripping kicks off, and has lots of vocoders on the soundtrack. Cool, right? Why not put on a hoity-toity voice and talk about it as an “arthouse homage to American pulp cinema”? After all, isn’t that what Godard was doing all those years ago? Well then!

Drive is a masterpiece of surface over depth. Catnip for anyone who thinks cinema is for the eye rather than the brain or heart. A bromance between Refn and its star Ryan Gosling that borders on the homoerotic and is meant to send geezer viewers into crush mode, but not so much they’ll have to worry they’re actually, like, gay. It’d take a brave filmmaker to risk losing his core audience. Refn is many things, but he’s not brave.

What’s it about? Well, “about” is a very loaded word. That implies issues and stuff. Who wants to go there? Let’s just say it features a guy. A guy without a name. Just like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Just like that guy – that nameless guy – in every other Western. This one doesn’t have a horse; he has a silver Chevy Impala, and a black Mustang, too.

His boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston) calls him “Kid”. But let’s call him The Driver. By day, he’s a stunt driver for what will probably end up being very boring Hollywood action movies. By night, he’s a getaway driver for anyone who’s paying. Just driving, mind: no shooting, no fisticuffs. Keep it clean, keep it mean.

Shannon, who runs the garage where The Driver is also a mechanic, has a scheme. He fancies he can turn his employee into a car-racing champ. The kid’s got the talent; all that’s needed is some cash for a car.

All? You know it’s going to end not in tears, but in vein-slitting and abdomens being skewered. Especially when the moneymen Shannon’s dealing with are a curly-haired Jewish mobster (Albert Brooks) and a huge-headed pizzeria-owner (Ron Perlman) who pimps around as if he’s a West Coast rapper.

What’s missing so far? A girl! Luckily, she’s very pretty: it’s Carey Mulligan playing Irene, a struggling mum down the hallway whose husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is in jail. Luckily, she doesn’t talk very much. In this kind of film, and in the kind of films Refn likes to make, women are ornaments. They don’t – can’t – have anything to say: to be disappointed by that is like being disappointed that kitties don’t get on their hind legs and greet you when you come home. It’s a species error.

Still, soon Irene’s holding hands with The Driver, who makes eyes at her and is happy playing with her young son. He’s even willing to help Standard raid a pawn shop. It goes badly wrong. Everyone’s on his back. Finally, out comes the killer inside him.

Don’t worry! It’s not ugly violence that ensues. Not the nastiness Casey Affleck unleashed in Michael Winterbottom’s noir adaptation The Killer Inside Me (2010). Not the violence of young rioters in London: that’s too raw and too real, too hard to be semi-detached and ironic about. This violence is the sort that makes you gasp for a microsecond and then think: “Hmm. Neat!”

Drive is cinematic retromania at its best – or at its self-conscious worst. You’ll be reminded of Peter Yates’s Bullitt (1968), Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004). Time collapses: the pink-neon italics of its opening credits and the plinky synth-wave songs that (played almost in full) pepper its soundtrack are from the 1980s; its super-stylised violence straight out of Quentin Tarantino’s early Nineties films; its shiny, buffed brand of cartoon-like pulp a close cousin to Robert Rodriguez and Zach Snyder’s adaptations of graphic novels in the 2000s.

Ryan Gosling is credited as lead, but the real star is cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel. He isolates deft colour symmetries, constructs angular frames plumed by light flares and street halos, and cares about the space around characters as much as he does the characters themselves.

The space between words is glaring, too. Hossein Amini has stripped James Sallis’s source novel down to the bone. Gosling has always been a laconic actor; here he adopts a sing-song whisper so quiet he’s on the brink of being an elective mute.

What he does have – apart from ever-so-slightly baffling hair, double denims, and a satin jacket that will no doubt be ripped off by high-street fashion chains any day now – is a stillness that makes his shift into head-slamming mode all the more jolting.

Gosling is seductive to a fault: Refn has talked up The Driver as an existential figure, but he comes across as a basically good guy who just wants to settle down. A good guy who’s also a fly guy and a badass. He should have been more ambiguous. He should have been more unsettling.

But that would have made Drive a different movie. And Drive, for all its aesthetic bells and whistles, its slo-mo raptures and hipster sound design, is really the same old same old.

Drive: Seven Magazine review, by Jenny McCartney

Seven rating: * * * *

The ascent of Ryan Gosling to leading-man status – resulting in two films out this week – could be a sign that cinema, in one of its periodic shifts, is getting smarter. Gosling, with his half-smile and close-set watchful eyes, brings an air of interesting complexity to proceedings, a trace of weirdness that is light years away from the genial beefcakes that have dominated the screen of late (the latter best encapsulated in two words: Ashton Kutcher).

If charm is the elusive ability to make people believe upon first meeting that you already understand them, and that thereafter anything might be possible, Gosling has it in spades.

Directors are attracted to it, and like to test it, milk it or even destroy it – as in Blue Valentine , Derek Cianfrance’s heartbreaking depiction of a marriage in decline, where the appeal of Gosling’s character was painfully crushed under a series of small, workaday failures.

In Drive , Gosling’s charm leads him by the hand into the heart of darkness. He plays a loner known only as “The Driver”, who is a stuntman by day, and a getaway driver by night. He keeps his criminal jobs tightly controlled, working to strict rules: “I give you a five-minute window.”

With his close-shaven face and white jacket, he looks as sharp and clean as an arrow flying towards the future. Then he falls for Irene (Carey Mulligan), his neighbour across the hall, and everything starts to get messy.

Irene has a wide-eyed little boy, Benicio, and a husband in prison, and she and the Driver soon begin to gaze at each other with unspoken but eloquent longing.

For this, Gosling and Mulligan are admirably suited: they share the gift of being able to exude the kind of tangible sweetness that renders dialogue not only unnecessary, but excessive. Yet, when Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), comes out of prison owing a large sum of money to some violent criminals, they swiftly threaten to extend punishment for non-payment to Irene and the boy. The Driver helps Standard do one last job to pay them off, and they all plunge into an awaiting chaos with more corpses than Titus Andronicus .

Nicolas Winding Refn’s direction remains taut, as the Driver is gradually tugged – to protect his little surrogate family – into extreme violence, which he carries out with an unsettling combination of a soft voice and intense efficiency. As the tension escalates, the masterly cinematography frames both blood and beauty with the same quiet, considered eye.

The images become theatrical: in one scene, Gosling stares into the camera, his face masked in blood, mutely aware that he is now a captured player in a grimmer game. In another, the elevator door slides shut on Irene, blonde and gleaming, the sole remaining point of innocence in the film.

Throughout, Drive retains the sheeny, stylised quality of a noir fable, but it is a fable with feeling.

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Drive Review

23 Sep 2011

100 minutes

Alan Ladd's 1953 classic Western Shane is a tale of a man who, trying to escape his past, turns up at a homestead and, in trying to save a woman and her child from black-hats, finds himself drawn inexorably back into the violence he has tried to escape. Drive is very much like Shane, in that it has a strong, silent hero, determined to do right by the innocent while struggling against his character which, as Heraclitus so pithily put it, is also his fate. But it also has a sequence of a man having his cranium reduced to a bloody pulp by an enthusiastically deployed boot à la Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, someone gets a fork shoved in their face, and a good portion of it is shot in slow motion. It is therefore that much better.

Nicolas Winding Refn, a Danish director best known for the Pusher trilogy and 2008’s thug-opic Bronson, is proof of the fact that American pulp is sometimes much better done by Europeans. Think of Paul Verhoeven’s mischievous satires RoboCop and Starship Troopers. Here Refn delivers a gripping, gritty neo-noir drenched in so much mid-’80s styling that the only thing that seems to be missing is Simon Bates thanking us for listening and exhorting us to enjoy the film.

Refn’s skills are not limited to artfully conceived bloodletting: an opening sequence in which our hero practises his trade, transporting a pair of thieves from their place of business to safety, dodging, parking and reversing, is a masterclass of cutting in which the precision of the editing matches that of the driving (and actually it’s far more exciting than the more conventional car chase later in the movie). Meanwhile Newton Thomas Sigel’s sheeny cinematography delivers gorgeous chopper shots of the neon-flecked night-time streets of LA and moody renderings of asphalt car parks, race-tracks and diners. The cumulative and exhilarating sensation is that Walter Hill or William Friedkin made an urban noir sometime back in 1986 and somehow you missed it (and it’s easily as good as The Driver or To Live And Die In LA).

And Refn’s good taste extends to the casting. Carey Mulligan might not have a lot to do, but she looks believably vulnerable; Albert Brooks proves that actors more familiar with comedy can often turn on their menacing side to great effect (it’s he who gets to stick a fork in a guy’s face), while Ron Perlman, well, as usual Ron Perlman just has to turn up, really.

And then there’s Ryan Gosling. Starmaking roles are as rare as actual stars these days, but this just might be one. Gosling pushes the strong, silent (exceptionally pretty) type almost, but only almost, to parody. Toothpick permanently wedged between his teeth (an obvious nod to Clint Eastwood’s ’60s cheroot, and indeed, the ‘no-name hero’ and vengeance fantasy plot reinforce the feeling that this might be as much Western as thriller), he channels the glacially imperturbable attitude of Steve McQueen. He even manages to make what looks like a quilted jacket sporting a yellow scorpion emblazoned on the back — a nod either to Kenneth Anger’s cult 1964 short Scorpio Rising or the fable of The Scorpion And The Frog, depending on who you believe — look like something you might want to check out on your next visit to Topman. An actor hasn’t looked this cool in rubbish duds since Brad Pitt in that teapot dressing-gown in Fight Club. But Drive’s primary pleasure is its astonishingly realised retro style: it’s as if someone distilled a tincture of the ’80s, all cocaine attitude and Giorgio Moroder, and mainlined it into something like the present. Top Gear, then.

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Drive Review

Drive will get people in the seats because of Ryan Gosling, but it won’t be for everyone. It’s a slow-burn movie that’s spliced with scenes of jarring violence that will turn off some. Plus, Ryan Gosling alone won’t be enough for others to like this film, as his performance is unnervingly calm throughout. Until the violent moments, that is.

A lot of critics love director Nicolas Winding Refn ( Bronson , Valhalla Rising ). He does cinematically interesting things, and all of his films are long and slow in their narrative, with interludes of gory violence that are supposed to break up the monotony. You’ll see a lot of moments where characters stare off into space at nothing with what looks like deep contemplation on their faces. Sometimes it will be a warranted introspection, but usually not.

Refn’s critical acclaim will generate a lot of very positive reviews of Drive , and the film is already earning rave reviews from the festival circuit. There might not be much of a mainstream audience for this movie, but there will be a strong audience for it.

On the road again…

Drive is based off a book of the same name by James Sallis, and if you’re interested in trivia, you might like knowing that Drive is Refn’s first movie based off of a novel, and with a script that wasn’t written by him.

It follows Ryan Gosling as the aptly named Driver, a Hollywood stunt-driver and mechanic working for Shannon (Bryan Cranston), the a middle man who gets him jobs as a wheelman for criminals. You might hear some comparisons between Gosling’s Driver and Jason Statham’s Frank Martin from The Transporter series, and while the plots are very loosely similar and the characters both have “rules,” these movies are not alike. Don’t listen to someone who compares this film to The Transporter . Ever.

The crime goes badly, and Driver has a hit put out on him by Nino — played by a greasy Ron Perlman — who is partners with smooth crime boss Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks). In response, Driver goes on a series of revenge hits of his own — revenge hits that are disgustingly violent. Trust me, there’s a moment in an elevator and another in an Italian restaurant run by Perlman that will make you cringe.

Supporting roles make the movie

Ostensibly, this film is about Gosling’s Driver and his relationship with Irene. The problem with this is that Gosling is infuriatingly calm. He rarely shows emotion and has a lot of scenes where he just seems to be staring off into space. It bothered me, but I know that it won’t annoy everyone. His performance does add contrast when he starts his revenge journey.

Irene mostly disappears in the third act, which almost makes the whole point of Driver killing people a waste of time and human lives. Still, her presence is barely felt in the first two acts, and she is mostly a blank to begin with. Refn is a decent director of men, but the women in his roles (there aren’t any really in Valhalla Rising and only a few in Bronson ) seem to drift in and out his movies as excuses for plot movement, not roles with depth or humanity.

Albert Brooks is the star, though. He really chews into the role of Bernie Rose. Even when he speaks in a friendly, genteel manner, there is a layer of menace under his voice. Despite that, you think he’s kind of the hands-off mob boss who doesn’t get his hands dirty. In the third act, he does get down in the muck, and it’s glorious and terrifying to witness. I would honestly recommend this movie on Brooks’ performance alone.

Drive moves between long calms and short, extreme moments of violence that are either gritty or very artistic. It is a Nicolas Wending Refn movie in tone and view. The problem is that the violence and the supporting characters overshadow the main relationship between Irene and Driver. I’ve harped on it this whole review, but I firmly believe that the violence and the way it’s employed in this movie will push some audiences away. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be people who don’t mind the brutality, but it will be hard for some to swallow.

I liked Drive, but it’s hard to really find a particular reason why. The more I think about it, the more I’m reminded that Albert Brooks is the best part of this movie. It’s too bad he’s not the focus of the whole film. If you are on the fence and looking for a reason to check out Drive , see it for Brooks’ performance. It is some rich acting from the normally comedic actor.

[Drive is rated R, with a running time of 100 minutes]

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Not Okay tells you exactly what kind of a film it is before it even begins. The new film from writer-director Quinn Shephard, which charts one vapid influencer's rise to fame and subsequent social media cancellation, opens with an explicit warning that it contains, among other things, “an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a message that comes across not only as a winking nod to the ways in which a term such as “likable” has been weaponized against women over the years but also a vow that Not Okay isn't going to play it safe.

That's a promise that Shephard doesn’t fully follow through on. The film’s “unlikable” protagonist, Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), is narcissistic and coldly opportunistic in all the ways that one expects an ambitious social media influencer to be, and Shephard spends much of Not Okay’s first act establishing Danni’s obsessive desire to be noticed. When her boss (played by Negin Farsad), an editor at a culture website named “Depravity,” scolds Danni for writing in one piece that she believes she lost out on an integral generational bonding moment by missing 9/11, Not Okay makes it explicitly clear what kind of protagonist we’re dealing with. An unlikable female protagonist who is too likable But before Not Okay gets to that, it follows up its attention-grabbing opening message with a montage that throws viewers right into the deep end of the viral hate campaign that eventually turns Danni’s life upside down. The montage follows Danni as she sobs while obsessively consuming all the various tweets, articles, and YouTube videos that have been made by those who are so anxious to paint her as the world's worst person. Whether it’s meant to or not, the sequence creates an immediate empathy for Danni and, even more importantly, clues you into the loneliness that is at the heart of all of her attempts to gain viral fame.

If you’ve ever plugged the word “Bourne” into the Netflix search bar, watched at least two minutes of Extraction, or Googled “Avengers: Endgame streaming,” The Gray Man owes you a special-thanks credit. Netflix’s charmless new action movie is a veritable tag cloud of keywords adapted into a lump of generic subscriber bait. Every one of its creative decisions, from the casting to the rat-a-tat snark of the dialogue to the stock on-the-run premise, might have been made by someone in the metrics department. The only way The Gray Man could feel more algorithmic is if it starred Ryan Reynolds, the current king of the content farm.

In fact, the title role is occupied by a different handsome, blonde Ryan in his early 40s. That would be Ryan Gosling, who's usually more discerning about which projects to prune from the offer stack. Codenamed Sierra Six, perhaps in the hope that audiences might mistake this for a spinoff of Netflix’s 6 Underground, Court Gentry (Gosling) is a convict who agrees to become a weapon of the state in exchange for a commuted sentence. “You’d be part of an elite unit,” sweet talks his CIA recruiter (Billy Bob Thornton), banking on Suicide Squad having never made the cut for cell-block movie night.

Mashing up genres can be hit-or-miss in Hollywood. When it works out, the film can be a fascinating blend of familiar tropes and subversive spins on the expected. When it doesn't, it can be a frustrating jumble of elements that don't play well together.

Fortunately, Hulu's The Princess falls into the former category, delivering a fast-paced action film filtered through a familiar fairytale premise, peppered with enough clever twists to provide plenty of surprises.

'Drive' Ending Explained: What Happens to Ryan Gosling's Driver?

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While the films of Nicholas Winding Refn are often divisive among critics and audiences due to their shocking content, his 2011 film Drive has been widely acknowledged as one of the best films of the past several decades. Drive proved that Refn wasn’t just a “style over substance” filmmaker, as it was clearly a project in which the technical innovations were justified for the story that was being told. There’s certainly something inherently exciting about the film’s electrifying score and the propulsive action sequences, but at its heart, Drive is a love story that reinvents classic noir and Western archetypes into a slick modern thriller. It’s almost strange for a filmmaker as notoriously flashy as Refn to show such male sensitivity with his lead character, but Drive leaves the audience emotionally overwhelmed until its shocking (if somewhat confusing) ending.

Drive was baffling to some audiences who went in expecting something close to The Fast and the Furious , as Gosling’s nearly wordless performance isn’t as inherently expressive as most action movie protagonists. In fact, those expecting a straightforward action storyline may be shocked to see a rather downbeat, emotional examination of futility and forgiveness. While the complex gangster storyline involving The Driver’s last heist is complex in its own right, analysis has suggested that not everything about the last act of Drive is as literal as it seems . The increasingly surrealist nature of Refn’s work suggests the same thing, as Drive is both a terrific genre exercise and an examination of the common archetypes that frequently pop up in crime movies.

Who Is Ryan Gosling's Driver Really?

Drive is loosely based on the novel of the same name by James Sallis , and follows a nameless drifter ( Ryan Gosling ) who works under the veteran mobster Bernie Rose ( Albert Brooks ). While the Driver attempts to make a break from the profession that he’s contributed so much of his life to, Rose refuses to let him go. It gets more complicated for The Driver when he begins to fall in love with his neighbor Irene ( Carey Mulligan ) and forms an attachment to her young son Benicio ( Kaden Leos ), only to realize that her husband Standard Gabriel ( Oscar Isaac ) is a dangerous ex-con. Pushed to his capacities, The Driver attempts to save his new family and have the happy life that he’s always dreamed of. What begins as an odd romantic drama turns into a gripping crime thriller when The Driver becomes terrified about showing Irene his true nature; he comes to believe that she will reject him if she learns about the violence that he is capable of.

Throughout the film, the audience is given the impression that The Driver is unable to change his inherent nature and redeem himself from the acts of savagery that he has committed. Early on, The Driver watches a movie with Benicio, who tells him that he can tell that the shark is the villain. When The Driver asks if the shark could ever be a “good guy,” Benicio says it isn’t possible. This represents The Driver’s dilemma – he’s tempted by a normal family life with Irene, but he keeps getting dragged into the criminal world. The Driver’s facial reactions to violence are often those resembling a timid child, who is scared of what he has become. The fact that he doesn't have a given name reflects that just like the villain in a standard action movie, he does not have a personality or backstory that would make the viewer feel bad about his potential demise. The film goes to show how harmful this is to The Driver's mental health; after being told to "play the bad guy" for years on end, The Driver begins to believe that he really is the monster that everyone claims that he is supposed to be.

How Ryan Gosling Went From Angry Indie Boy to the Funniest Lead in Hollywood

Another hint about this theme comes through the story of the frog and the scorpion that is told. A scorpion asks a frog to take him across the river, to which the frog refuses out of fear. Although the frog agrees after the scorpion tells him that they will both drown if he ends up stinging, the scorpion stings the frog anyway because he can’t change his nature. It’s no coincidence that The Driver’s iconic jacket has the image of a scorpion on it . This is essential to understanding The Driver’s conception of himself towards the ending, as he ultimately chooses to leave Irene and continue going on other crime missions. Although it is left ambiguous as to where exactly The Driver is going next, it is heavily implied that this is the last time that he will ever see Irene and Benicio.

There’s no sequence that shows this change better than the elevator brawl. The Driver savors his last “normal” moment with Irene by kissing her, then showing who he truly is when he kills the thugs. It’s as if he has “stung” Irene by drawing her into his world, and this is accentuated once he discovers the body of his handler Shannon ( Bryan Cranston ). After putting on the rubber mask from the movie set, The Driver dispatches Nino ( Ron Perlman ) on a beach in a very cinematic atmosphere. At this point, it’s as if he feels that he’s ascended to a heightened cinematic reality. The fact that the film takes place in Los Angeles , and thus is deeply grounded in an environment where filmmaking is a commonality, makes it even more difficult for The Driver to differentiate his real personality from the persona he has taken on to be more intimidating.

Does Ryan Gosling Die at the End of 'Drive'?

The Driver has received an ultimatum from Bernie, who offers to protect Irene and Benicio if he receives the monetary reward. The Driver complies, but prior to his meeting with Bernie, he calls Irene and informs her that he will not return, but that she will be safe and taken care of. While this doesn’t necessarily suggest that The Driver is accepting death , it does indicate that he won’t see Irene again to not put her in danger. He hopes that she will emerge having a fond memory of his as what the theme song refers to as “a real human being.” This suggests that The Driver has at least accepted his own identity as a hero, even if he is not able to share his identity with the people he cares about most. As is often the case in hero narratives, the main character's ultimate mission is one of self-sacrifice; this doesn't mean that The Driver is dead, but it does indicate that he will never be able to enjoy living out a normal life with the people who care about him the most.

After The Driver meets Bernie and hands him the money, the ruthless Jewish mobster stabs him in the gut. It’s likely that The Driver expected this, as later shots show him scanning the restaurant and mapping out the area ahead of time. Since The Driver already has a knife with him ready to stab and kill Bernie in return, it’s suggested that he expected to be betrayed and had entered the restaurant with the intention of killing him. When he leaves and drives off at the end, The Driver does not take the stash of cash that has been “tainted” with blood . While The Driver has never been in his line of work for purely selfish reasons, his refusal to take on the cash suggests that he is trying to back his way out of any "blood money," and thus is trying to shut out this segment of his life forever.

Some have speculated that The Driver didn’t actually survive and that the final drive away is him ascending to heaven and living out the vision of himself that he imagined. This is possible, but considering the blood is still on his hands there’s no implication that he’s in a dream sequence in the final moments of his life. Even though The Driver is severely wounded, he expected to be attacked by Bernie. Irene knocks on his door and realizes he’s gone for good, but The Driver had wanted to leave her behind to not intrude on her life anymore. Drive is a relatively straightforward film that’s more interesting on multiple viewings to look at its metaphorical implications . Refn plays with the iconography of the Los Angeles crime scene to examine the mythologization of heroes and villains, and the scenes on a film set suggest that Drive is analyzing the nature of crime films. It remains one of the best films of the 21st century , regardless of how you choose to interpret the ending.

Gosling and Refn Reunited After Drive

Ryan Gosling Fighting In 'Only God Forgives'

Although Drive never ended up receiving a sequel that wrapped things up in a more comprehensible way, Gosling and Refn teamed up once more for the controversial revenge thriller Only God Forgives , another arthouse crime thriller with overt metaphorical allusions. If Drive examined romantic archetypes in Western cinema, Only God Forgives served as an analysis of broken family dynamics with its story of two brothers caught in a cycle of bloodlust. Those who complained about the minimal dialogue in Drive may be shocked to see that Gosling has even less dialogue in Only God Forgives , which makes no attempts to appeal to any mainstream sensibilities.

Only God Forgives was highly divisive among both viewers and critics , and initially received boos when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the frequent violence and non-linear narrative structure may have been a major impediment that many viewers were not able to look past, Only God Forgives is a beautiful-looking movie that remains entirely committed to its strange premise. It's to the credit of both Gosling and Refn that they attempted to do something bold and different, rather than just trying to replicate the same success that they had already had with Drive.

Drive is available to rent on Amazon in the U.S.

A mysterious Hollywood action film stuntman gets in trouble with gangsters when he tries to help his neighbor's husband rob a pawn shop while serving as his getaway driver.

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Here are 13 of Ryan Gosling’s most highly rated films ahead of the release of Barbie later this year. Cr: Getty Images.

Ryan Gosling Oscars: Here are 13 of the best film starring Barbie favourite Ryan Gosling

Engagement Journalist

Ryan Gosling's Oscars performance of 'I'm Just Ken' was the cherry on the top of an astonishingly good year for the Canadian.

He has been one of the hottest names in Hollywood over the past decade since he exploded onto the scene with early noughties romance classic The Notebook .

One of the more versatile actors on the planet , the Canadian's performance of the iconic 'I'm Just Ken' may just become one of the most iconic live music performances the Oscars have ever seen and it feels like the buzz around his wonderfully fun role as Mr Plastic Fantastic will never end - and perhaps it shouldn't.

The 42-year-old has enjoyed immense success and picked up a total of three Academy Award nominations, a British Academy Film Award nomination, one Golden Globe Award from five nominations, and four Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. Quite simply, Gosling is hot property.

Understandably, streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have ensured their platforms are stocked with some of the Canadian’s best films but which eye-catching films starring Gosling should you tune into tonight?

We took a look at his 13 most highly rated films and where you can watch them, utilising the help of film review site Rotten Tomatoes to guide us.

. Drive (2011) - 93%

Photo: Jason Merritt

. La La Land (2016) - 91%

Photo: Christopher Polk

. The Nice Guys (2016) - 91%

Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS

1 . Drive (2011) - 93%

It is perhaps no surprise to see thrill a minute hit Drive ranked as Ryan Gosling's best movies. Heralded by movie goers across the globe, the film offers oodles of action, thrills, blood, guts, gore and a big smattering of romance. It's a classic and is currently streaming on Netflix UK. Photo: Jason Merritt

2 . La La Land (2016) - 91%

Alongside Emma Stone, Gosling's role in musical La La Land breathing fresh life into a genre that had become predictable and understandably saw the Canadian pick up a host of nominations at many of the biggest awards ceremonies. Currently available to rent, stream and buy from Apple TV, Rakuten TV, Sky Store. Photo: Christopher Polk

3 . The Nice Guys (2016) - 91%

The Nice Guys saw the 42-year-old team up with Australian actor Russell Crowe in a good old fashioned cop buddy movie that cinema fans and critics loved. The film is currently available to rent via Amazon Video, Apple TV, Chili, Google Play Movies, Sky Store, YouTube, Rakuten TV. Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS

4 . Half Nelson (2006) - 91%

Half Nelson won Gosling the Best Male Lead award at the 22nd Annual Film Independent Spirit Awards and is one of his best earlier films. Currently available to stream on ITVX, FreeVee, Amazon Prime. Photo: Kevin Winter

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Ryan Gosling is 'The Fall Guy' in this cheerfully nonsensical stuntman thriller

Justin Chang

Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy. Universal Pictures hide caption

Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy.

From the 1933 action film Lucky Devils to the 1980 comedy-thriller The Stunt Man to Quentin Tarantino 's Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood , filmmakers have long delighted in turning the camera on stunt performers, those professional daredevils who risk life and limb to make action scenes look convincing.

It's a hard, often thankless job, which is why for years people have lobbied the motion picture academy to present an Oscar for stunt work. And of course, it's a dangerous job: Just last month, while shooting the Eddie Murphy movie The Pickup , several crew members were injured during a stunt involving two rolling cars.

There's a lot of vehicular mayhem in the noisily diverting new action-comedy The Fall Guy , a feature-length reboot of the '80s TV series. Ryan Gosling stars as a highly skilled stunt performer named Colt Seavers, who, despite his cynical film-noir-style voiceover, genuinely loves his job.

Colt loves movies and moviemaking, loves hurling himself off balconies and strapping himself into soon-to-be-totaled automobiles. Most of all, he loves Jody Moreno, an up-and-coming assistant director played by Emily Blunt , and she loves him right back.

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt star in The Fall Guy. Universal Pictures hide caption

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt star in The Fall Guy.

Colt works mainly as a stunt double for Tom Ryder, a world-famous movie star played by a preening Aaron Taylor-Johnson. But when Colt suffers a life-threatening injury on the set, he quits the biz in despair and ghosts Jody for more than a year while he recovers. But then he learns that Jody is directing a big-budget sci-fi movie in Sydney and wants him to be Tom's stunt double again. Upon arriving Down Under, however, Colt finds out that Jody did not ask for him and has no idea why he's here.

The reason for Colt's appearance on the set is one mystery in a cheerfully nonsensical thriller plot devised by the screenwriter Drew Pearce. There's also a body in a bathtub, an incriminating cell phone and several amusing side characters, including a busybody producer played by Hannah Waddingham of Ted Lasso fame.

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Another key player is Colt's best friend and stunt coordinator, Dan, played by the always excellent Winston Duke . In one endearing running gag, Colt and Dan keep quoting dialogue from classic films like The Last of the Mohicans , The Fugitive and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, all of which The Fall Guy giddily tries to outdo in its sheer volume of death-defying mayhem.

Before long, Colt isn't just performing stunts. He's forced to put his well-honed survival skills to good use off the set, whether he's beating up thugs in a nightclub, punching villains in a helicopter or getting tossed around in the back of a speeding garbage truck. That's one of several set-pieces that the director David Leitch opted to shoot using practical techniques, rather than CGI — a decision that gives this stunt-centric movie an undeniable integrity.

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The Fall Guy is undoubtedly a passion project for Leitch, who once worked as a stunt double for actors including Brad Pitt and Jean-Claude Van Damme. (He nods to this by giving Colt a handy canine companion named Jean-Claude.) Leitch can direct action beautifully, as he did in the Charlize Theron smash-'em-up Atomic Blonde . But he can also go too flamboyantly over-the-top, as in sloppier recent efforts like Bullet Train and Hobbs & Shaw . The Fall Guy is better than those two, but it would have been better still with cleaner action, tighter editing and a running time south of two hours.

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Blunt is such a good comedian and action star that it's a shame she doesn't get more to do in either department; Jody may be in the director's chair, but as a character, she's mainly a second banana. The Fall Guy is Gosling's picture. Unlike the brooding, taciturn stuntmen the actor played in Drive and The Place Beyond the Pines , Colt is a wonderfully expressive goofball. There's a moment here, after a fiery boat chase around Sydney Harbour, when Colt emerges triumphant from the water, clothes dripping and muscles bulging, while a euphoric cover of Kiss' "I Was Made for Lovin' You" surges for the umpteenth time on the soundtrack. It's ridiculous and gloriously overwrought — and like the best-executed stunts, it comes perilously close to movie magic.

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COMMENTS

The existential getaway driver movie review (2011)
A review of the movie "Drive," focusing on the life of a driver who works as a getaway wheelman and a stunt driver for action movies.
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Drive is a thrilling film about a stuntman who becomes a getaway driver and gets entangled in a dangerous heist to protect his neighbor.
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"Drive," directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, is about an unnamed virtuoso driver, played by Ryan Gosling, and his Chevy Impala getaway car.
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Drive is what Driver does, and driven is how audiences will feel after a screening of Nicholas Winding Refn's brutally moving thriller, which stars Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston and ...
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Drive is basically the coolest movie ever. Its dreamlike, electronic soundtrack -- perfect for travel at night -- layers meaningful messages into a violent fairy tale about an unconventional hero.
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Drive: Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. With Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks. A mysterious Hollywood action film stuntman gets in trouble with gangsters when he tries to help his neighbor's husband rob a pawn shop while serving as his getaway driver.
Drive Review: Ryan Gosling Film Delivers Fresh Guilty ...
Starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stuntman/getaway driver, "Drive" takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process. Serious ...
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With Ryan Gosling ably incarnating a pent-up man of few words who goes to great lengths to make one positive gesture in a rotten world, Danish wunderkind Nicolas Winding Refn has fashioned an ...
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Drive movie review. Matt reviews Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Albert Brooks.
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Ryan Gosling stars as Driver, a Hollywood stunt performer and mechanic who also moonlights as a getaway wheelman for criminals after their heists. He is a man of strict professionalism; he will ...
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User Reviews. In Los Angeles, a mysterious driver (Ryan Gosling) is a man of few words that works as a garage mechanic for his only friend Shannon (Bryan Cranston); stuntman in Hollywood films; and driver of getaway car in heists. One day, he helps his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), whose husband is in prison, and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos ...
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Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director award at Cannes, and it's easy to see why this tale of an emotionless wheelman (Ryan Gosling) who lives to drive and makes a rare stab ...
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Drive - Metacritic. Summary Drive is the story of a Hollywood stunt driver by day, a loner by nature, who moonlights as a top-notch getaway driver-for-hire in the criminal underworld. He finds himself a target for some of LA's most dangerous men after agreeing to aid the husband of his beautiful neighbor, Irene.
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What's the Story? The "driver" (Ryan Gosling) drives stunt cars for the movies by day -- and by night he hires out his services for criminals who need getaway cars. He works with hard-luck-but-cheerful mechanic Shannon (Bryan Cranston) on both jobs.
Ryan Gosling On Drive : This Is My Superhero Movie
In Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn's (Pusher, Bronson, Valhalla Rising) neo-noir thriller in theaters this week, Ryan Gosling plays an enigmatic outsider known only as "The Driver," a Hollywood stunt jockey who moonlights as a getaway wheel man for a local crime boss. Co-starring Carey Mulligan and Albert Brooks, the film is a genre piece ...
Movie Review: Drive (2011)
Movie review of Drive (2011) by The Critical Movie Critics | Ryan Gosling is a man with a past who falls in love with his married neighbor.
Drive (2011 film)
Drive. (2011 film) Drive is a 2011 American action drama film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. The screenplay, written by Hossein Amini, is based on James Sallis 's 2005 novel. The film stars Ryan Gosling as an unnamed Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. He quickly grows fond of his neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and ...
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Drive Review By day, 'Driver' (Gosling) is a Hollywood stunt man, but by night he makes his real money in the criminal underworld as a top-flight getaway driver.
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Ryan Gosling stars as a stuntman and getaway driver on a violent revenge spree in this Nicolas Winding Refn film. Read our Drive review for more.
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I've seem to come across a lot of mixed reviews on Drive. People have either adored it or scolded it. I happen to think its a great flick. People complained about the drawn out shots and lacking dialogue from Gosling. But i thought it was a beautifully made film with a surprising performance from Gosling. The opening action shot of the car chase is hands down one of the best chase scenes ever.
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Drive (2011) - 93%. It is perhaps no surprise to see thrill a minute hit Drive ranked as Ryan Gosling's best movies. Heralded by movie goers across the globe, the film offers oodles of action, thrills, blood, guts, gore and a big smattering of romance. It's a classic and is currently streaming on Netflix UK. Photo: Jason Merritt
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The Fall Guy is Gosling's picture. Unlike the brooding, taciturn stuntmen the actor played in Drive and The Place Beyond the Pines, Colt is a wonderfully expressive goofball. There's a moment here, after a fiery boat chase around Sydney Harbour, when Colt emerges triumphant from the water, clothes dripping and muscles bulging, while a euphoric ...

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