Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 2 ratings
Driver is a skilled Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals. Though he projects an icy exterior, lately he's been warming up to a pretty neighbor named Irene and her young son, Benicio. When Irene's husband gets out of jail, he enlists Driver's help in a million-dollar heist. The job goes horribly wrong, and Driver must risk his life to protect Irene and Benicio from the vengeful masterminds behind the robbery.
Drive is a visually stunning neo-noir that earns top marks for its cinematography — Nicolas Winding Refn composes frames with painterly precision, bathed in neon and shadow — and for its acting, particularly Ryan Gosling's near-silent, magnetic performance and Albert Brooks playing brilliantly against type as a menacing crime lord. Its novelty is genuinely high: the film's slow-burn European art-house sensibility grafted onto a Hollywood crime thriller, its 80s synth-pop score, and its stark tonal contrasts between quietude and shocking brutality give it an unmistakable, singular identity. The plot, while elegantly sparse, is fairly conventional in its bones — a heist-gone-wrong revenge arc — and earns a solid but not exceptional score. The ending, though thematically fitting and visually poetic, is deliberately ambiguous in a way that feels slightly unsatisfying rather than earned, holding it back from a top mark.