Blowhard, Esq. writes:

While I enjoyed DRIVE, after watching this one, it was clear to me why others didn’t enjoy DRIVE. There’s no pixie-cute Carey Mulligan to redeem this one, instead, we’ve got an impotent, Oedipal-conflicted Ryan Gosling avenging the death of his rapist-murderer brother. Writer-director Nicholas Refn isn’t terribly interested in the story, though, as much as he wants to create space for a cool, deliberate exercise in style. The primary actors seem to be occupying a living tableaux, a sort of Pageant of the Masters meets Asian cinema where no one behaves in any recognizably human way. This is a world where children can watch a man’s chest sliced open or witness a masked killer being gunned down in front of them and they react with Buddhist calm. Although I wasn’t emotionally engaged in the least, I did admire the framing-within-frame of its visuals and the neon garishness of Larry Smith’s camerawork.

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• Via Fabrizio, Refn parodies himself.