This Week at the Movies

Moviegoers who take their crime stories hard boiled and with a touch of existentialism will want to run, not walk, to see Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish, lean thriller “Drive.”

The film pays homage to a number of movies and genres that have come before it, tipping the hat to George Stevens’s classic “Shane,” Jean Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai” and the 1980s films of Michael Mann and William Friedkin. And yet “Drive” is still quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

The picture breaks down the neo-noir genre to its bare essentials. In a remarkable opening sequence, we meet Ryan Gosling’s Driver – much like Clint Eastwood’s western anti-hero, we never learn his actual name – as he assists in a late night bank robbery getaway in downtown Los Angeles.

“If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place,” he tells his clients. “I give you a five-minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m yours, no matter what. I don’t sit in while you’re running it down. I don’t carry a gun. I drive.”

During the daytime, he works as a Hollywood stuntman and a mechanic for Shannon (Bryan Cranston, of “Breaking Bad”), who is also mixed up with a pair of particularly nasty gangsters (played with gusto by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman).

One day in his building’s elevator, the Driver meets Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young woman who is raising a little boy on her own as she awaits her husband’s release from prison.

The husband, named Standard and played by Oscar Isaac, comes home and enlists the Driver to help him pull off a robbery. Once the job’s done, Standard can pay off some thugs whom he paid for security while he was in prison.

“Drive” is filled with double crosses, one or two intense car chases, spare dialogue and style to burn. Several of its characters meet pretty brutal ends.

From its opening credits, which recall “Miami Vice,” to its haunting synthesized soundtrack, Refn’s film aims to capture the tone of moody mid-1980s crime films.

Despite the fact that his character is the film’s most reticent, Gosling proves with this performance that he is the real deal. The typically comedic Albert Brooks is particularly memorable as the fierce Bernard Rose, a former movie producer turned gangster. And both Cranston and Mulligan create sympathetic portrayals of people who have come up short in life’s lottery.

“Drive,” which nabbed the Best Director prize for Refn at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is pure genre bliss. It is the first must-see film of the fall.

Rod Lurie’s remake of “Straw Dogs” is this past weekend’s other exploration of man’s capacity for violence.

The movie retells the story of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic nearly note for note, but moves the story from England to modern day Mississippi.

James Marsden plays David Sumner, a Hollywood screenwriter who is traveling to his wife’s (Kate Boswell) hometown to renovate her recently deceased father’s home and work on a script involving the Battle of Stalingrad.

If you’ve seen the original, you know the story: a group of local men performing construction on the house resent Marsden’s big city boy attitude and steal glances at his attractive wife.

I won’t give away anything further, other than to imply that something very bad happens that leads Sumner to explore his dark side as the locals, led by a particularly nasty James Woods, attempt to raid his fortress.

Lurie’s picture neither packs the punch nor displays the intellectual heft of Peckinpah’s film. But it nearly works as a home invasion thriller. Its finale is intense and visceral.

The biggest stumbling block is the screenwriters’ choice to spell out the film’s themes, whereas the 1971 film relied more on implying its ideas. The new version misses the mark, but just barely.

Gus Van Sant’s “Restless” is the weekend’s sole film without wince-inducing violence, but I wouldn’t go as far to calling it light viewing.

The story is an offbeat assemblage of “Love Story” and “Harold and Maude”: morose boy, spunky girl, budding romance and a fatal disease.

Although the movie is a minor one in the great Van Sant’s oeuvre, it still manages to charm. Despite some forced quirkiness, Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) and Mia Wasakowska display chemistry and the picture looks great.

The filmmaker, whose resume includes “Elephant” and “Good Will Hunting,” is among the few to portray youth without condescension or idealization. “Restless” may not be one his best movies, but it works.