Drive (Winding Refn, 2011): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.50pm
This 35mm screening is part of thenNicholas Winding Refn season (details here) and also one devoted to Ryan Gosling (click here).
Time Out review:
'The
truly great ‘LA noir’ movies – ‘Point Blank’, ‘The Driver’, ‘Straight
Time’, ‘To Live and Die in LA’, ‘Heat’ – share common characteristics
beyond the basic clichés of the crime genre. These are movies informed
by the city in which they were made, a city constructed of gleaming
surfaces – six-lane highways, vast industrial wastelands and endless
suburban sprawl – and a place where crime is grubby and small-time,
carried out by empty, hopeless loners in hock to dapper despots with
unpredictable personalities. It’s in this world that we find the
near-silent hero of ‘Drive’, Nicolas Winding Refn’s self-consciously slick, synth-scored throwback. Ryan Gosling plays the unnamed Driver, a mechanic and occasional getaway guy whose life is overturned when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan),
a struggling mum with a husband in the joint. As all the above implies,
this is a film built on familiarity, in terms of narrative and style:
neon lights flash, rubber tyres screech, Gosling broods, Mulligan swoons
and a trio of wisecracking, overdressed character actors – Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman and
Bryan Cranston – provide both levity and dramatic weight. But ‘Drive’
never drags: this is an entirely welcome riff on old material, a
pulse-pounding, electronically enhanced cover version of a beloved
standard. Sure, it’s shallow, but it’s also slickly compelling,
beautifully crafted and so damn shiny.'
Tom Huddleston
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