Drive: Critic Reviews

Drive revels in sensory detail; it's a visually and aurally edgy Euro-influenced American genre movie about the coolness of noir-influenced American genre movies about the coolness of driving - especially in L.A.

"Drive" is somber, slick and earnest, and also a prisoner of its own emptiness, substituting moods for emotions and borrowed style for real audacity.

Drive is a movie with power but is still directionless; the acceleration is great, but the steering needs looking at.

Buckle up; it's quite a ride.

The look is artfully stylized, influenced by classic film noir; the mood is dark; the performances nuanced; and the story unnervingly exciting.

Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn neatly manage the hat trick of paying homage to those wheelmen of yore while reinvigorating the genre with style, smarts and flashes of wit.

Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again.

The film... has a kind of daredevil control, swerving dangerously close to and abruptly away from self-parody.

For all the movement in Drive, the quiet, deathly still moments are the ones that count.

[Gosling] and this powerful film, which is ultimately about a moment of grace, deserve each other. He's the medium's most graceful minimalist.

The first half of Drive unfolds like a romantic reverie.

In reworking genres without quoting shamelessly, Refn proves himself his own man and a guy quite capable of taking us places we didn't even know we wanted to go.

...Two-thirds' worth of a pretty good to quite good action picture and one-third worth of affected, highfalutin, practically insufferably portentous, pretentious malarkey.

Why would Gosling, a fascinatingly cerebral actor, take a role so far inside his comfort zone? Does he long to strike action-icon poses -- to be the new Nic Cage?

In grabbing our attention, [Refn] diverts it from what matters. The horror lingers and seeps; the feelings are sponged away.

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.

Before long, and then with grinding relish, "Drive" becomes one garishly sadistic set piece after another.

Though it easily surpasses most American action flicks, it suffers from the old commercial imperative of making the protagonist a nice guy, something Refn has seldom bothered with in Europe.

A shamelessly entertaining genre movie from director Nicolas Winding Refn that plays like an exalted episode of Miami Vice or a stealth version of Shane.

Drama requires emotions and cool requires their suppression. The tautly paced, peerlessly stylish crime drama "Drive" has it both ways.

Drive is pedal-to-the-metal stuff. Don't get behind the wheel unless you can take the rush.

Think of "Drive" as the cinematic equivalent of riding in a car that projects a fashionably stylish image. Sure, the gas mileage may be terrible and the engine unreliable, but it's such a smooth, good-looking ride that you'll put up with the annoyances.

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

It's fun, but the script, credited to Hossein Amini ("The Wings of the Dove"), is short on characterization and long on plot twists and wisecracks.