Metacritic reviews

Starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stuntman/getaway driver, Drive takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process.

Drive not only met my hopes; it charged way over the speed limit, partly because it's an unapologetically commercial picture that defies all the current trends in mainstream action filmmaking.

Ultra-violent and ultra-stylish, Drive stands out in this year's Cannes competition for its calculated, hard-edged brilliance.

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."

From the beginning, it's clear this is not a standard-order action film. It takes its characters as seriously as its chases, shootouts, and fights.

Drive dynamically merges a terrific film noir plot with a cool retro look, evoking '60s classics like "Point Blank" and "Bullitt."

Oh alright, it ain't "Shane." But it is about as much shamelessly disreputable, stylish, ultra-violent fun you're going to have at the movies this year.

A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.

Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.

Every bit as dumb as August's "Conan the Barbarian" but awash in neon-lit nightscapes and existential dread, with killings so graphic that you can't entirely believe what you're gagging at.