Nicholas Winding Refn has a knack for making violence look good. The Danish director has asserted that art itself is an act of violence, and aims to demonstrate through his own work how violence itself can be beautiful. He's arguably yet to do this better than he did in Drive - a tense, brooding crime picture that abruptly detonates into hyper-stylised art-house action. Licked in a glossy pallet with eighties music acting as its beating heart, Drive suddenly becomes so much more than a car-chase flick; blowing up like a manic fireworks display. We now know what Refn is about, and before watching one of his films we readily strap ourselves in for a show of glorious, good-looking gore. Not so, back in 2008. Although Refn had made his mark on independent cinema with the Pusher franchise, Drive was his first real mainstream breakthrough, and the vast majority of audiences expecting a conventional crime thriller had their jaws beautifully prised open by Refn's glossy art-house violence.
