Drive: Press reviews

At Cannes: 'Without doubt the most stylish film in years, Drive plays like the best episodes of Miami Vice'

'Shamelessly disreputable, stylish, ultra-violent fun... Drive's primary pleasure is its astonishingly realised retro style: it's as if someone distilled a tincture of the '80s, all cocaine attitude and Giorgio Moroder, and mainlined it into something like the present.'

'This wonderfully concentrated movie version makes the book seem baggy in comparison.'

'For audiences looking for an ice-cool, uncompromising and gut-wrenching pulp thriller, the search ends here.'

'Drive may be too slow and arty to set the multiplex box offices on fire, but it deserves to become a cult classic.'

'Drive may be too slow and arty to set the multiplex box offices on fire, but it deserves to become a cult classic.'

At Cannes: 'If the route feels familiar from a hundred other movies, no matter. Driver is surely heading straight to hell and his downward plunge has a definite giddy intensity.'

'[Gosling's] lo-o-o-ng languid pauses before he deigns to speak are worthy of Clint's Man With No Name. It's not your clothes or your ride that matters, it's your attitude, and this guy has it in spades. At 30, he's poised right on the brink of superstardom.'

'Slickly compelling, beautifully crafted and so damn shiny.'

'An explosive action movie that got Cannes critics whooping in the aisles. Any jolting violence is cushioned by lush, low-key longueurs comprised of geometric cityscapes, abstract tableaux, striking camera angles, calibrated light and shadow, reflective surfaces, empty corridors and terse, economic exchanges full of syncopated beats. Gosling wasn't kidding when he described Drive as a mix of Blue Velvet and Purple Rain... '

At Cannes: '"Drive" takes the tired heist-gone-bad genre out for a spin, delivering fresh guilty-pleasure thrills in the process'

At Cannes: 'a fun, if not exhilarating, ride, one sped along with the help of a wonderfully assembled cast.'

'There is no shortage of pulse and finesse in [the director's] vision; "Drive" marks the first occasion on which Refn has shot a film in America, and, like countless outsiders before him, he casts an eye that is at once entranced and stunned. By his own admission, though, he doesn't have a license, and it shows. The man behind "Drive" can't drive.'

At Cannes: 'a magnificent homage to US crime films from the late 1970 and ‘80s'

'Drive is cinematic retromania at its best – or at its self-conscious worst. You'll be reminded of Peter Yates's Bullitt, Walter Hill's The Driver, Michael Mann's Collateral.'

'all style and no soul'.

'Ryan Gosling turns on the charisma in this slick LA noir, but its baffling plot holes mean it's not completely convincing'

'Drive is a terrific film for the first hour – and then, I confess, I turn off this particular freeway... The splatter-style violence (though largely suggested) is so excessive that Refn seems to be doing it not because it makes real sense, but because, in a fanboy way, he just can.'

At Cannes: 'It's the perfect example of a film with a split personality. Gentle romance on the one hand and vicious violence on the other'

At Cannes: 'ultra-stylish neo-noir may be fine as a flashy genre piece, but originality is not its selling point'