Reseñas de la crítica

The kicker is an arresting performance by Albert Brooks as an oddly likable villain, the kind of guy who tries to calm you down after slashing your wrists. Brooks adds some needed zest to what is essentially a glossy and entertaining but empty exercise.

Film criticism is more naïve than Drive when it accuses it of clichés. Drive goes intentionally into these stylistic connotations, “the purveying of imaginary and stereotypical idealities,” as Jameson translates Roland Barthes (another author who detected, anticipated, aestheticized, fetishized all of this). It drives precisely through the ambiguity of the exhausted and inexhaustible advertising verb to drive.

It's a breakthrough of an entirely different kind, an injection of clear, cool European technique into a classic American fable of guns, cars, girls and money.

Superficially an action movie, Drive is actually a film in search of romance, zigzagging through an obstacle course of fairy tale and myth, and a hall of mirrors in which characters can be read as fantasy projections of others while being aware of themselves as figures inside a myth.

An “existentialist road movie,” in the words of my viewing companion, Drive is such a thrilling, taut, visually dazzling exercise in genre filmmaking that even its more gruesome scenes—such as Gosling crushing a man’s skull with his foot—left all of us giddy.

The visual and audio details, along with the perfectly cued pop music score, make Drive completely enthralling. . . . All are wonderful echoes of a blistering genre past, and in Drive they are brilliantly reimagined for a whole new generation of cinephiles to appreciate.

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.

At least half a dozen scenes are burned into my memory for life, including not one but two of the most jarring, heartbreaking juxtapositions of tenderness and violence this side of classic Kitano. At its best, it’s pure genre bliss.

Refn has a big, thick style. It's impasto filmmaking. He can make a lot happen with narrative little (though there is a script by Hossein Aminii). Here Refn finds about a half-dozen ways to disturb utter stillness with grisly violence and nudge the tiniest bit at the limits of time and space.