Drive (2011)

I was equally as impressed by what Drive wasn't as what it was. Drive easily could have been a foreign director coming to Hollywood given boatloads of cash to make an over expensive generic exercise in genre futility. Instead it fully embraces its predecessors drawing on their influences while still managing to update them into a modern time & setting.

Young good looking get-a-way car driver without a name whom races and roars down night lighten L.A. highways right out of Walter Hill's The Driver. Blossoming romance with a blonde brought to peril by ruthless man who's more villainous than would first appear &
Tangerine Dream sounding pop soundtrack right out Michael Mann's Thief. Iconic cool demeanor and muscle car chase scene right out of Bullitt. The isolated professional alone in his room reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai.

Even the Scorpion jacket and the frog & scorpion fable from movies like Orson Welle's crime thriller Mr. Arkadin to modern works like The Crying Game.

The plotting is standard crime fare but the minimalist approach allows the story to unfold as a violent romance fantasy. Brought out fully by the cast's ability to act with facial expressions and body language. Gosling in particular is able to pull off his anti-hero role like a man with no name Eastwood in a Leone movie where he is required to be the films center as well as just it's title character. The cinematography fits perfectly with the L.A. city noir mise-en-scène and the ambient pop score manages to draw out emotions where dialog is absent.

There have been minimalist thrillers in the past decade but pretty much all foreign. Drive was the best American minimalist thriller with an incorporative score that I've seen since Ghost Dog.