He has no friends, no past and no name. “I drive,” he says. He does. Opening with its coolest set-piece – an intense, tightly constructed stop/start getaway – Drive immediately shows us how.
Having spun the story of Brit criminal Charles Bronson into a 21st-century Clockwork Orange, hotshot Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn joins forces with Ryan Gosling to take a classic American genre-engine– a girl, a hero, a dark lord, cars, guns, dirty money – and give it a gleaming new Euro-cool chassis. Read the rest of this entry »
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For once, no one gets whacked, stabbed in the neck with a pen or beaten to a bloody pulp. For once, it isn’t that kind of ‘Family’ movie. In fact, the film most unlike anything Martin Scorsese has ever made is really the most personal of his career.
1. Jamie Lee Curtis
Captain America: First Avenger ends with the saddest last line in blockbuster history. Chris Evans delivers it beautifully: unexpected, gentle, agonisingly poignant. But the movie doesn’t seem to notice. It triumphantly roll the credits, you walk out of the cinema wondering why your heart just decompressed inside your chest, and off we zoom to next year’s superhero-a-thon The Avengers. 
For you, it’s been nearly 20 hours of cinema. For them, it’s been a lifetime. After 10 years, seven movies, four directors and a truckload of exposition, the Harry Potter’s saga finally matures into the spectacular, propulsive and emotionally satisfying blockbuster it should have been from the start. 
It was like capturing a picture of the Yeti or the end of a rainbow. But in the middle of a lecture at Columbia university in March 2009, one student with a camera-phone finally snapped it: James Franco asleep. Head hung back on his shoulders. Jaw gently unlatched. Hands folded over his notebook.
Which places on Earth would still love to visit?
Two things before we start on Terrence Malick’s philosophical, spiritual, experimental, transcendent, cosmic odyssey. One: it’s shorter than Transformers 3. Two: it has dinosaurs in it. But really, where on earth do we start? Not on Earth. Not at the start. Further back. In The Beginning… 
Love has taken a battering lately. Blue Valentine, Rabbit Hole and The Kids Are All Right have all shown it busting up, breaking down and dying hard. Love’s had it tough. Love’s had Twilight, for pity’s sake. But things weren’t always like this. 
Life-eating obsession. Dizzying detail. Surgical precision. This two-disc Director’s Cut DVD slams home the point: this gripping true-life procedural is as much as about David Fincher’s hunt for the Zodiac killer as it is about the story of the men who burned up two decades of their lives looking for him. 
