Drive

Drive (2011) was marketed as an action film and is not one. The gap was wide enough that a viewer in the United States sued the distributor for misleading advertising. A man whose name is never given works as a stuntman and mechanic by day and a getaway driver at night. He states his terms: five minutes. He starts building something with his neighbour Irene and her son, and then a job goes wrong. The film is nearly silent. Gosling speaks perhaps a hundred words in the whole thing. Refn fills the space with music, and that eighties synth pop score becomes the second character. There is little violence and it is shocking when it comes. The elevator scene is the exact example: a kiss and an execution, one after the other, inside the same shot. Refn won best director at Cannes for it. The satin jacket with the scorpion on the back is among the most imitated costumes in modern cinema. Good for: stylised crime, films with almost no dialogue, and eighties aesthetics and sound. Less good for: the violence is sudden and graphically severe, and a few scenes are genuinely difficult. Anyone expecting a fast car movie will be wrong in every direction.