Drive Reviews
Top CriticSure, it's shallow, but it's also slickly compelling, beautifully crafted and so damn shiny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
In grabbing our attention, [Refn] diverts it from what matters. The horror lingers and seeps; the feelings are sponged away.
The extreme and escalating violence will prove off-putting to some-frankly, I'm surprised not to have been among them-but for the rest, Drive is a needle-punch of adrenaline to the aorta.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Drive is pedal-to-the-metal stuff. Don't get behind the wheel unless you can take the rush.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
This is no antic-frantic affair; instead, it's a cerebral game of stop-and-go, hide-and-seek, as the director behind the camera handles things exactly like the guy behind the wheel - with a stylish mixture of cold calculation and cool aplomb.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The pace of this film is a beautiful thing to behold, as Drive is a patient but taut thriller.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
For stone-cold, retro action fans who are tired of all these over-edited, underachieving thrillers - well, here's one car chase movie that isn't running on empty.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Anyone watching Drive won't be able to take their eyes off Gosling. Playing a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman for criminals, he rocks like a young Steve McQueen or Robert De Niro.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a film in love with both traditional noir mythology and ultra-modern violence, a combination that is not ideal.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The look is artfully stylized, influenced by classic film noir; the mood is dark; the performances nuanced; and the story unnervingly exciting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Mainstream audiences will probably be confounded by "Drive," while lovers of gritty filmmaking will defend every exaggerated shotgun wound as art. Know which camp you're in before you enter the theater.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
For all the movement in Drive, the quiet, deathly still moments are the ones that count.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The first half of Drive unfolds like a romantic reverie.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Tasty, if sketchy, modern noir with car chases and bloody action that should turn the trick for genre-seeking audiences.
[Gosling] and this powerful film, which is ultimately about a moment of grace, deserve each other. He's the medium's most graceful minimalist.
To invest oneself emotionally in the central relationship, or the movie itself, would be akin to investing oneself emotionally in one's car. But when the car looks this good and drives this fast, why not?
"Drive" is somber, slick and earnest, and also a prisoner of its own emptiness, substituting moods for emotions and borrowed style for real audacity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
"Drive" is a fine and stylish, if ultraviolent, ride, filled with unexpectedly askew camera angles, nighttime lighting worthy of Raymond Chandler, and nuanced performances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Enters the viewer like a sharp unseen blade.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There's a sleek, pulse-pounding, heart-racing machine in Drive, but it's buried deeply under an oppressive package of optional extras. For all of its good ideas -- and there are plenty of them -- the film eventually buckles under an excess of style.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Drama requires emotions and cool requires their suppression. The tautly paced, peerlessly stylish crime drama "Drive" has it both ways.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
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.
Before long, and then with grinding relish, "Drive" becomes one garishly sadistic set piece after another.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
What ultimately makes Drive so compelling is its characters - sketches given dimension and heft by a superb cast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Pulsating...very cool. Could have used a little more "driving," though.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Drive feels like some kind of masterpiece -- it's as pure a version of the essentials as you're likely to see.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Gosling's masculine, minimalist approach makes him mysteriously compelling. Yes, there's the fact that he's gorgeous. But he also does so much with just a subtle glance, by just holding a moment a beat or two longer than you might expect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The film... has a kind of daredevil control, swerving dangerously close to and abruptly away from self-parody.
Perhaps Drive is an action movie for those who don't ordinarily like action movies. It's also an action movie for those who crave them like a drug.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
...Two-thirds' worth of a pretty good to quite good action picture and one-third worth of affected, highfalutin, practically insufferably portentous, pretentious malarkey.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
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?
Buckle up for the existential bloodbath of Drive, a brilliant piece of business that races on a B-movie track until it switches to the dizzying fuel of undiluted creativity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Tense car chases, action scenes handled with crisp panache and Canadian actor Ryan Gosling channelling Steve McQueen as an existential wheel man add up to make Drive one of the best arty-action films since Steven Soderbergh's The Limey.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"Drive" builds extraordinary tension before exploding in brief outbursts of shocking violence, almost in the mode of a samurai film.
Drive takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process.
