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. Crazy to think this was meant to be a Neil Marshall blockbuster vehicle for Hugh Jackman.

Just as Refn streamlines his movie for pure vibe, Gosling stylises his own performance right to the brink of absurdity – and makes it mesmerising instead. He’s a Hollywood stunt racer who moonlights as a getaway driver (or is it the other way round?), wearing a strange half-smile and a scorpion-embossed satin jacket. He’s gentle, beautiful, almost wordless in a dreamy first-half love story with sweet mom Carey Mulligan, who’s lovely as the innocent pixie-princess in a role that’s hardly there. He gazes at her, we gaze at him. Mulligan summarised shooting Drive as “staring longingly at Ryan Gosling for hours each day.” We get it. He doesn’t even need to whip his shirt off to make us swoon this time.

But Gosling’s lonely mystery-man says so little, you almost start wondering if he’s right in the head. Turns out, he’s not. Not at all. As Mulligan’s jailbird husband (Sucker Punch’s talented Oscar Isaac) brings ruthless gangsters crashing into their world, Gosling’s soft-eyed chivalry is suddenly revealed as unblinking psychosis.

Underneath those handsome looks, he’s a dangerously unstable cut’n'shut of Travis Bickle (socially weird, prowling the streets at night alone, burning fuse to power-keg violence) and idiot-savant Raymond ‘Rain Man’ Babbitt (he’s an excellent driver). Gosling’s nameless “Driver” is also the most modern descendant of Jean-Pierre Melville’s noir loner Le Samourai. Seems odd that the lean screenplay (adapted from James Sallis’ 2005 pulp novel) was written by a writer best-known for his Oscar-nominated work on The Wings Of The Dove. Odd, until you discover Hossein Amini’s next script is Keanu Reeves’ feudal Japanese adventure 47 Ronin.

Sure enough, Drive shifts like a Samurai movie as Refn constantly feathers the accelerator pedal for maximum tension. Clocked to the adrenaline pulse of a Cliff Martinez’s excellent techno-pop score – College’s ‘Real Hero’ already feels iconic – the hypnotic rhythm is detonated by sudden, shocking eruptions of violence.

If the romance is chaste, the action sure isn’t. When Refn slams his foot down for the first-time, a breakneck road battle jack-knifes into a slo-mo motel shootout that leaves your jaw hanging. That first smack of a leather driving-glove on a woman’s face is a stinger. Once someone’s head explodes at the end of a shotgun, it’s open season. Gosling impales his first victim with a shower rail, goes for some DIY dentistry with a hammer, then stomps clean through a skull – in the same breath as a dreamy slo-mo smooch with Mulligan.

It’s right at this point you start wondering if the entire movie is really taking place inside Driver’s unhinged mind. “I used to make movies in the ’80s,” says comedian Albert Brooks, amping up the menace as a sinister crime-lord. “Action films, sexy stuff—one critic called them European.” Nods to Michael Mann, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen and Ryan O’Neal are all there. But we can go even further back.

In the 1968, English director John Boorman’s made his American debut with art-noir masterpiece Point Blank about a reluctant heist gone wrong. It starred Hollywood hero Lee Marvin as a man named ‘Walker’, who barely spoke and glowered with the promise of brutality to transform a seemingly simple story into an existential quest for meaning.

For all the parallels, that film had Marvin’s emotional sad-core to anchor its cerebral stylistics. We can’t say the same about Gosling’s unknowable charismaniac. Truth be told, Drive doesn’t have anywhere to go with him. In the second half, it has no more set-pieces for us, no psychology for Gosling and pretty much forgets about Mulligan completely in this male world of machismo and violence.

Refn has suggested that his American debut is both a fairytale and – brilliant, this – an ultraviolent remake of Sixteen Candles. But what’s really under the hood? There are no emotions here, just moods. Stripped down for pure style, Drive is content to cruise on a retro-mythic mojo that feels different to anything else you’ve seen this year.

That’s not enough for greatness – the coolest B-movie of 2011 fades on second viewing.  But playing a man with no name, no friends and no past just made Ryan Gosling the hottest name in Hollywood with a lot of fans and a big future. Cross your fingers and maybe he can persuade Refn to do the next Fast And Furious.

RATING: ★★★★

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. 

“I think the reason why the Zodiac still haunts us is the letters,” says Fincher on his intelligent, considered commentary. “The crimes themselves are, by today’s serial-killer standards, not that grotesque. But the letters are the key for me. This ongoing correspondence with someone who is ‘in process’, the evolution of his thinking.” The filmmaker might as well be talking about himself. Once again, he goes about meticulously, methodically recording his own process via another fantastic DVD package.

In Fincher’s hands, the tale of cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) hunting the San Francisco serial killer brilliantly fuses crime thriller, newspaper potboiler and period time-capsule. But Graysmith’s self-obliterating obsession is really Fincher’s target – piling up more and more facts, burrowing deeper into the labyrinthine mystery, chasing the truth until nothing else matters.

The devil in the detail. Fincher talks through decision to ditch the stylistic pyrotechnics of Fight Club and Panic Room (“I don’t want people to be distracted from anything the characters are saying”). His superhuman attention to the little things: camera, sound, editing, props, period intricacies (running 25 takes to get a three-second shot where someone compares two sets of handwriting). Forcing Gyllenhaal to carrying on shooting when he was sick with a 102 temperature (“I think it focused him – he’s truly great in that scene”).

Surprisingly, Fincher’s Director’s Cut adds just four minutes of extra footage. More dialogue. More of the process. “People just could not abide by a scene where three guys are talking into a speakerphone,” says the director, of one sequence in which the cops talk their boss through the case. “This scene cracks me up. Anytime you can cut to a speakerphone, it’s like Charlie. I just love the idea of these guys laying it all out for Charlie!”

Great banter and, yes, more process in a second commentary by Gyllenhaal, Downey Jr, producer Brad Fischer, screenwriter James Vanderbilt and particularly James Elloy. After introducing himself as “James Ellroy, king of American crime fiction, acknowledging this as one of the half-dozen great American crime films”, the author hurls out nuggets like, “You know there are systemic inequities in the death penalty system, but motherfuckers like this have to die.”

Split into The Film and The Facts, Disc Two unloads hours of featurettes dissecting everything you could possible want to know about the history of the Zodiac and the making of Fincher’s film. And probably plenty you didn’t. Case in point? Nearly three hours of interviews re-telling the story of the Zodiac case and prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen.

It’s gasp-snatching stuff. Not only do we have vivid, deeply personal first-hand accounts from the policemen who worked on the Zodiac case, but survivors talking through in staggering detail horrific encounters with the Zodiac. Bryan Hartnell was stabbed six times and watched his girlfriend murdered. He coolly explains what he and the Zodiac said to each other (“Don’t worry, I just want your car”), what he was feeling (“I was taking a sociology class and I thought I might be able to squeeze a paper out of it”), what happened when the stabbing started and what he thinks of the scene in the film (“I couldn’t have scripted it better”).

Vanderbilt explains his own quest for the killer, researching the story through hours of interviews. “So you’re sitting having dinner with a very nice man and you know that at some point you’re gonna have to ask, ‘So… when you were tied up, how did you first know he was going to stab you?’” Then comes the eye-popping Making Of footage: Fincher pulling the strings on set and building his world, great and small (helicopters winch in giant trees, while production designers grovel in the mud planting individual weeds).

Copious FX featurettes also reveal the invisible magic behind Zodiac’s apparently ultra-realist drama. Ruffalo seems to spent much of his time wandering around a blue-screen set, while tech-experts fill in blood, knife blades, people walking their dogs on sidewalks and whole cityscapes.

Best of all in this fascinating insight into Fincher’s process? The director’s description of directing: “Imagine painting, but you’re 200 yards away from the canvas. And 80 people are holding the brush. And you’re a on walkie-talkie, going, ‘We need a little blue there. No, no, no, darker blue. DARKER BLUE!’”

FILM: ★★★★★

DISC: ★★★★★

Publication: Total Film.

Look closer… Vertigo’s sick little brother sees snoop reporter Jimmy Stewart stuck in a wheelchair with nothing to do but waggle his long lens at the neighbours. Has he discovered a murder? Should he get involved? Should we? Too late, already. With the camera locked inside Stewart’s room for the entire film, Hitchcock’s chilling essay on voyeurism (read: movie-going) stares right back at you. Meaning? Rear Window is the definitive guilty-pleasure movie. Watch it in a double-bill with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, then go for counseling.

Ignore the coma-inducing restoration chatter on the DVD’s excellent 55-minute doc. There’s a plethora of critics (including director Curtis Hanson, Peter Bogdanovich and Robin Wood) and crew to dig into the film’s thematic payload and production backstories. There’s also a 13-minute interview with screenwriter John Michael Hayes, a hefty stills gallery, promo stuffing and trailers.

FILM: ★★★★★

DVD: ★★★

And then there was one… Fifty years later, Robert Vaughn is the only member of The Magnificent Seven left alive. But as icons on the Western landscape, they’re as immortal as Monument Valley.

Well, apart from Brad Dexter, who lives on as a pub-quiz answer. And Horst Buchholz. Who? Exactly. Amazingly, the film’s best role – made famous by Toshiro Mifune’s feral, ferocious performance in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai – went to a German actor making his American debut as a Mexican gunfighter called Chico. Go figure.

But remaking Kurosawa’s original – itself inspired by John Ford’s saddle-sagas – as an all-star Western was a no-brainer. It remains one of the most entertaining movies in the genre, as Hollywood alpha-males Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Vaughn crank up the charisma to play seven gunslingers hired to defend Mexican peasants from Eli Wallach’s pack of greedy banditos.

Stage-trained Wallach took it all very seriously indeed, asking locals to teach him to shoot and snarl, not to mention having actual bandits play his henchmen. Everyone else just had a blast. Despite having genre classics Bad Day At Black Rock and Gunfight At The OK Corral under his belt, director John Sturges was no Kurosawa – emotional depth and pulsating tragedy are jettisoned in favour of popcorn fun and macho posturing. There’s a ton of both to be had watching McQueen attempt to steal every scene away from Brynner. If the two stars’ ego-joust during shoot is old news, there are countless fascinating pieces of trivia to chew on, served up via this Blu-ray’s superb commentary (Wallach, Coburn, producer Walter Mirisch, assistant director Robert Relyea) and Making Of doc Guns For Hire.

Choice cuts? How Brynner, who initially intended to direct, registered the title The Magnificent Six when he thought one of the characters would be dropped. How McQueen faked a car accident in order to escape a TV series he was contracted to in order to do the film. How Anthony Quinn sued Brynner after being excluded from the project. How Chinatown’s genius cinematographer John Alonzo began his career as an actor in the film. How Kurosawa was so impressed that he sent Sturges a ceremonial sword as a gift. No one know if he saw the three sequels, but mercifully, they aren’t included.

Both extras – along with trailers and stills – are jacked from the Special Edition DVD, but this Blu-ray gives a noticeable pump to the visuals. While there’s still some dirt and damage on the print, this is probably the best The Magnificent Seven has looked on the small-screen. A full-tilt restoration is surely just a matter of time. Hopefully Vaughn will get to see it.

FILM:★★★★

DISC: ★★★★

It sounded like one salty morsel: hottest girl on the planet stars as flesh-eating cheerleader in hipster horror-comedy written by Oscar-winning tattooed ex-stripper who can turn an indie comedy into a blockbuster. It sounded satirical, sexy, scary. So why did Jennifer’s Body end being none of those things? Why did audiences end up seeing 2012 and New Moon instead?

Not for lack of X-factor. Megan Fox is the high-school superhottie with a body tighter than an elastic band who’s mistakenly sacrificed as a virgin (hmm…) and becomes a literal man-eater whose undead beauty can only be kept alive by feeding off the weak flesh of men.

Maybe we should have said estroGen-X-factor. Or not. Sounds a bit too much like the kind of thing Cody would write. Cody knows she’s clever. She should do. She is. But despite sinking its teeth through all the high-school cliches – the jock, the goth and the nerd are actually pretty nice guys – Jennifer’s Body is too focused on its own attempts at cleverness to be truly subversive.

Kicking off with a riff on Sartre (“Hell is other people” becomes “Hell is a teenage girl”, dontcha know) and shamelessly desperate to be quoted back to her, Cody’s script overloads on patented slanguage that goes from genius (“You give me such a wettie”) to tedious (“freaktarded”). Each line is declared with such relish you can imagine Cody writing her favourite ones with a different-coloured pens. Unlike her breakout triumph Juno, the teenspeak here packs more affectation than affection.

You couldn’t get confused about Juno. It was a teen comedy. But genre-blurring is tricksy business: while horror and comedy are box-office gold, horror-comedies rarely ker-ching. As if groping for familiar handholds, girl-power director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Aeon Flux) nods blankly at anything from Carrie to Heathers but never gets a grip on whether she’s making a slasher, a comedy or a teen drama – and her movie ends up slipping between the cracks.

Hard to blame her, mind. Cody wrote the movie for a female audience (apparently 51% of punters were women) while the studio marketed it to Fox-hunting males who discovered the kill-scenes are coy (Jennifer’s gut-ripping is scare-free and gore-free), the sex is timid (the gratuitous girl-on-girl moment, not present in Cody’s original script, just makes Cruel Intentions look even sexier) and sly smirks displace fat laughs (9/11 gag? Whatevs).

Jennifer’s Body’s wittest moment arrives when an amoral emo band frontman (The OC’s Adam Brody, aceing the eyeliner and the sarky vibe) reveals why he’s burning down roadhouses and slaughtering virgins for Satan. “Do you know how hard it is for an indie band to make it?” he despairs, as one of the band members winces at the sight of his knife. “Do you want to be rich and awesome, like that guy from Maroon 5?”

But as for the movie’s true mantra? “Sandbox love never dies.” Jennifer’s Body is actually Cody’s very smart attempt at using the horror genre to explore the darker depths of teen angst, female sexuality and the weird world of female friendship. Mean Girls already nailed this more squarely and Heathers was blacker and bolder. Cody wants to push further… but can’t. Which is a shame, because she really might have had something here. This is a scary story of two little girls who transformed into an insatiable brunette and a timid blonde. An adolescent horror in which Woman is the victim, the monster and the hero.

Arguably given even less to do here than in Transformers, Fox is just a glossy cipher. Maybe we’re giving too much credit, but her wry sense of comedy suggests she could even be in on the joke. It might be disguised as a vehicle for Megan’s body, but Jennifer’s Body is actually about her obedient lifelong BFF Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried, glasses, ponytail, natch), a mousy, lovely nerd-girl with a nice boyfriend and a lot of patience. Seyfriend, of course, is a Mean Girls alumini and tries hard to provide a much-needed emotional centre to the movie. Trouble is, she looks as confused as the audiences did.

After a massively underwhelming finale, you wonder if Cody’s only half-kidding when she sets up a Buffy-style sequel. Either way, no chance of that happening. Pulled loose by the contradictions that make it so interesting, Jennifer’s Body leaves us with a jumble of shapely metaphors, wiseass one-liners and fleeting emotional insights. And maybe a cautionary tale on the dangers of getting in vans with hot guys.

Given the backlash suffered by the screenwriter, a commentary track like the one she recorded for Juno would have been a no-brainer. Both DVD and Blu-ray are vanilla-flavoured, sadly.

RATING: ★★★

DISC: ★

Mummy! Masterful screen terror as bad-girl-on-the-lam Janet Leigh picks the wrong place to spend the night. Scalpel-sharp edits, leering camerawork and Bernard Herrmann’s killer score max out the fear-factor in Hitchcock’s seminal black-and-white shocker. Three-mile queues were reported at some drive-in theatres when it debuted in 1960. It’s still not safe to go back in the water.

Go for the Collector’s Edition DVD with smart 90-min documentary The Making Of Psycho and shower-scene storyboards presented by Saul Bass.

FILM: ★★★★★

DISC: ★★★

Megamind critic David Thomson called Hitchcock “an inventor of thumbscrews”. In this twisted, diabolical love story, they’re firmly on Ingrid Bergman. She plays a booze-sozzled floozy forced to marry nice-Nazi Claude Rains to help the man she really loves - shadowy American agent Cary Grant. A creamy-smooth suspenser with an inky heart of darkness, it’s Hitchcock’s most stylish dose of poisonous eroticism and arch misogyny. Nazis, alcoholism, sexual favours, blackmail… What’s not to like?

On the terrific Criterion DVD release, the busting “Dossier” of extras (this being an espionage thriller) includes two loaded, erudite chat-tracks and some fascinating production correspondence (letters written by producer David O Selznick and others to Hitchcock during filming).

FILM: ★★★★

DISC: ★★★★

Yes, you saw the train go into that tunnel… Cheeky. Hitch sexes up the thriller genre with this knockout whisk of suspense, wit and style, sending Mad-man Cary Grant (the original Don Draper) pegging it cross-country with spies (who think he’s a double agent) and the police (who think he’s an assassin) hot on his arse. Classic scenes a-go-go – the crop-dusting plane and Mount Rushmore face-chase are rightly iconic – and brilliantly scripted by the late, great Ernest Lehman, who delivers a strolling commentary on this disc. Co-star Eva Marie Saint also presents a pleasing 40-minute documentary.

FILM: ★★★★★

DISC: ★★★

Or: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Hitchcock, But Were Afraid To Ask. And you should be afraid. Hitchcock’s greatest film, his most autobiographical film, is his blackest. Talk about falling in love: retired copper Jimmy Stewart can’t let go of the woman (Kim Novak) he’s been hired to tail and ends up taking a slo-mo tumble through the cracks in his own mind – taking her with him. A mesmerising view of human obsession, desire, guilt and exploitation – in which, most terrifyingly, love is the true MacGuffin. Wordless for most of its length, it gets deeper and darker with every viewing.

The DVD? Despite being bogged down in techie talk from Vertigo’s restoration geeks (rightly pleased with the two years spent creating the clean transfer), the cut’n’shut commentary’s splices from Kim Novak and first-hand memories from many of Vertigo’s other surviving crewmembers make this a real collector’s item. Martin Scorsese joins them in 29-minute featurette Obsessed With Vertigo, which reveals storyboards, behind-the-scenes footage and production info. Oh, and don’t miss the ruinous alternative ending, which Hitch was forced to shoot for foreign distribs. Storyboards, photos, posters, trailers and production notes pad the package.

FILM: ★★★★★

DISC: ★★★★

One setting. Eight people. Lots and lots of aggro. Hitchcock’s sloshy wartime thriller anticipates Big Brother’s Darwinian bear-pit by 50 years and ups the ante with eviction-by-drowning. Memo to Channel Four?

Like Rope (one apartment, no cuts) and Rear Window (one apartment, no legs), it’s one of the fatman’s most memorable experiments in phonebox cinema: the survivors of a sunk luxury-liner trapped on row-boat in the Atlantic with the German U-Boat Captain (Walter Slezak) who torpedoed them.

Lifeboat sank at the box-office and the script (snubbed by Hemmingway, started by John Steinbeck, finished by Ben Hecht) foghorns rudely with in-yer-face propaganda. But there’s enough novelty and nasty to keep the drama afloat as the cast – bossed by diva Tallulah Bankhead’s spoilt fashion-writer – bitch and bait each other with deadly consequences. During shooting, Bankhead caught pneumonia in the cold water. Hitchcock gave her a puppy – named Hitchcock.

More great behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the film’s troubled production surface on critic Drew Caspar’s scholarly commentary and this two-disc Special Edition’s 20-min doc The Making of Lifeboat, which also pulls in contributions from Hitch’s daughter Patricia. Best of all is the vintage 49-minute interview A Talk With Hitchcock, which sees the director discussing his films, his shooting style and his drives with malicious gentility. Look out for Hitch’s favourite cameo: a newspaper ad for a fictional diet aid called ‘Reduco’, featuring before-and-after snaps of the bulbous director.

RATING: ★★★

DISC: ★★★

Publication: Total Film