Drive ****

"Drive," a Los Angeles-set film noir starring Ryan Gosling and directed by cult favorite Nicolas Winding Refn ("Bronson," "Pusher," "Valhalla Rising"), is all about style. There is a spareness, an economy, an unhurried pace that allows actors long silences that nevertheless communicate, a dreamlike use of slow motion and lyricism that is operatic in its concentration of emotion that is the mark of a true master. It's no wonder that Refn won the Best Director prize at Cannes this year for this film.

Gosling plays a movie stunt driver and mechanic who moonlights as a getaway driver. All cool control, his competence is all we know about him. Then he meets a neighbor (Carey Mulligan) who has a young son, and he starts to show some signs of feelings. Then the violence of his moonlighting world and her past change everything. The violence that comes is brutal and shocking, but his cool command continues.

"Drive" is an unsettling film, but beautiful in its way, and full of sharply drawn characters from the underbelly of L.A.