Emphasising stillness over action, mood over thrills, Nicolas Winding Refn’s dreamy, ultra-violent neo-noir Drive will probably disappoint anyone expecting a super-charged muscle car thriller in the Fast and Furious mold. Equally informed by American crime melodramas and European arthouse, Drive has an aesthetic lineage that extends to everyone from Jean Pierre-Melville to Walter Hill (in particular, his 1978 film The Driver). Lest it becomes an exercise in sub-Tarantino pilfering, Refn’s dazzlingly tight direction and bold vision reigns it all into a gorgeous thing of its own. With its clean, striking compositions, eye-popping use of colour, light and shadow, and a lush soundtrack that bleeds from synthy electro-pop into Cliff Martinez’s Eno-esque filigrees and pulsing dread, the film is a model of slow-burning tension-and-release, tempered by the genre’s fatalistic inevitability while it imagines Los Angeles with a freshly alien, beautifully atmospheric luster the city hasn’t had in the movies in a long time. Part Steve McQueen, part Travis Bickle, Ryan Gosling’s performance is a method-induced minimalist powder-keg, a sharp contrast to Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman’s more overtly caricatured but nevertheless entertaining mobsters.