Drive

If you’ve been baffled by the sudden rash of Newswire announcements linked to Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling—a director-actor duo whose many upcoming projects together have some calling them the next Scorsese/De Niro (or Burton/Depp, anyway)—here’s why. The two made a huge splash at Cannes with the thriller Drive, a violent yet beautifully rendered, thick slab of genre filmmaking, in the best possible sense of the term, that stars Gosling as a stoic Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway car driver. Among an ensemble cast that includes Carey Mulligan (as Gosling’s neighbor and love interest), Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Christina Hendricks, the one person everyone will likely leave talking about is Albert Brooks, who sets aside his usual neurotic persona to play a short-tempered and dangerous mob boss, with revelatory results. Check out the red-band trailer and maybe you’ll see why everyone has already fallen in love with this thing.