Drive

For me, a completely bombastic demonstration of what a director with a vision can do from forgettable genre spectacles. Refn projected his fascination with inaccessible heroes, which is prolonged by passion and also by the fascination with stories in which the hero selflessly sacrifices himself. His pagan relishing of vibrations long after the main action of the shot is once again pure happiness, not to mention the beautifully shot car chases and captivating atmosphere of a Los Angeles night. Again, it should be underlined that for Refn, there is no main logic and story - these are just secondary links to the extremely strong scenes elaborated down-to-the-last detail. I look forward to the listing of all the nonsense that analyst viewers can bear, thinking that there is some consistency and story refinement in Drive. What fascinates me to the core: although this time the characters really talk a lot (they are Americans after all), the essentials about their motifs are expressed by Refn with a hint, gesture, facial expression. He simply remained Nordic, even in a field that is supremely "Hollywood". While it's a film with a completely accessible story, Refn made it into an uncontracted author's manifesto and a festival of subversive image-sound connectivity. I just love that Danish boy! Maybe he should make a Bond film. (07/09/2011)

Drive is a boring film. A long, drawn-out, empty and uninspiring bore that offered its best at the beginning (the scene of hiding and dodging police cars) and then didn't come up with anything I would call interesting. I think we can agree that the story is dull and boring to the point of shame, but I can’t say that it was filmed in such a way that it would stop bothering me. The fault is probably with my receiver, but I didn't see anything special. In fact, I didn't even hear it - the much-vaunted soundtrack consists, in my opinion, of only a few extremely strange and unpleasant songs, the title track being particularly repulsive. What's next in the film? Just the violence. A head shot, a head smashed, a head crushed, a fork in the eye, a knife in the throat, a razor in the forearm... And the camera shows everything. So? What of it? I feel that Nicolas Winding Refn is just a perverted guy who revels in these brutalities, and while the violence in the previous film, Valhalla Rising, had its purpose (although it really didn't have to absolutely show everything), here it was totally unnecessary, and I would even say purposeful. The last nail in the already very thoroughly hammered coffin for me was the unsympathetic Ryan Gosling. A big disappointment. (13/03/2012)

It’s hypnotic (almost everyone talked about the soundtrack after leaving the movie theater), clings to details (cinematography, sound), and constantly goes against established audience expectations. When I got up from my seat, sweat was pouring off me and it wasn't just the heat in the movie theater. (14/09/2011)

A ride that slams you hard into your seat and doesn't want to let go for a long time. Suspenseful to the bursting point, more action-packed than Michael Mann and ideas packed into the last second. We have seen plenty of gangsters and silent heroes on the screen for quite some time. But to simply have to run back to the cinema the next day to watch a movie again, that has never happened to me before. Even if I had to just observe the continuity of slow scenes or savor every tone of the soundtrack. (16/09/2011)

A stunning minimalist film, a unique experience for lovers of a blend of bearable art-modernism and uncompromising realistic rawness. I would devour everything about the main character, the music perfectly underscores it, and the action is uncompromising. Overall, a very meticulously styled film, whose creators have a knack for feeling and aesthetics and know exactly what and how to do it. (28/10/2011)