Ultra-violent and ultra-stylish, “Drive” stands out in this year’s Cannes competition for its calculated, hard-edged brilliance. It’s frankly commercial and sneakily artistic, in a way no other film I’ve seen in this festival is. It could be a big international hit — Americans will get to see it in September — or it could become one of those genre-geek fetish objects that doesn’t quite connect with a mass audience. It’s been the talk of the town since its Thursday night premiere, and no wonder; the history of Cannes is all about the long cinematic collaboration between Europe and America, and “Drive” distills that into one concise, intense and exciting movie. Is it a genuine Palme d’Or contender? I’m not sure about that; even in a year when the jury is headed by Robert De Niro, it’s a little hard to imagine a genre movie winning that prize amid an extraordinary Cannes lineup that includes Terrence Malick and the Dardenne brothers and Aki Kaurismäki and Pedro Almodóvar, not to mention the exiled von Trier.

Adapted by British screenwriter Hossein Amini from a novella by James Sallis — and you’d have to say this is pretty far from Amini’s award-winning script for the 1997 “Wings of the Dove” — “Drive” follows a few days in the criminal career of a solitary, unnamed stunt driver, who works on movie sets by day and drives specially modified getaway vehicles at night. One obvious point of comparison for the Driver (as he is identified in the credits) is Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the Sergio Leone westerns; like him, the Driver wears the same clothes throughout the film — a stained white bomber jacket with a yellow scorpion embroidered on the back — speaks rarely and only when spoken to, and never lies or brags. Gosling is a very different actor from Eastwood, but they both use composure and self-containment, rather than volume or violence, to radiate toughness.

As we learn in a dynamite opening sequence, the Driver hires himself out to robbery teams as a short-lived accomplice. He doesn’t carry a gun and doesn’t want to know much about what they’re doing. For the right price, he’ll get you where you want to go, just as often by out-thinking the cops, or sneaking past them unobtrusively, as by outrunning them. There are a couple of terrific old-school car chases in “Drive,” but Refn isn’t trying to outdo “Bullitt” or get the next assignment in the “Fast/Furious” franchise. This is more like a tense, moody noir in the Murphy’s Law tradition, where the hero falls in love with the wrong girl and winds up with one of those bags of Evil Money that destroys everything it touches.

I’ve probably piqued your curiosity enough for a movie that won’t reach American theaters for four months and runs a real risk of being over-hyped in the meantime, but let’s add a few more touches. Carey Mulligan plays the aforementioned wrong girl, nicely underplaying her role as a working-class American woman, quite sweet and a little lost. She lives next door to the Driver with her adorable little boy, and lets the Driver go pretty far down the road of friendship, flirtation and seduction before she remembers that her husband, who boasts the unlikely but irresistible name of Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac), is about to come home from prison. When that happens, Standard and the Driver circle each other cagily but never quite come to blows, and then the Driver makes the fateful decision to help Standard with that “one last job” that will get him out of debt to the shadowy gangsters threatening his family.

Of course this allegedly straightforward pawnshop robbery in the San Fernando Valley goes as far off the rails as it possibly could, leaving the Driver and a girl he’s just met named Blanche (Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men,” in a brief but memorable role) holed up with an extremely large sum of money that some very bad people want to retrieve. Refn’s tremendous supporting cast also includes Ron Perlman as a low-rent, pizzeria-owning Jewish gangster, filmmaker and comedian Albert Brooks as his more urbane-seeming but even more sinister puppeteer, and Bryan Cranston (of “Breaking Bad”) as the likable, fatherly mechanic who is the Driver’s boss and only friend.

Refn’s composition and lighting and editing instincts are miles ahead of most people who work in action movies. He’s not enslaved by these archetypal characters and this classic “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” plot, nor is he seeking to reinvent or “subvert” them. It seems to me that he’s trying to answer the question of what happens when you make this kind of American crime film really, really well: Is it just a slick, nifty entertainment, or can it lay bare issues about human nature that other forms of storytelling never quite face? “Drive” builds extraordinary tension before exploding in brief outbursts of shocking violence, almost in the mode of a samurai film. There’s one sequence shot in an elevator, which takes the movie from love story to violent revenge thriller within a few seconds, that film students will be deconstructing, shot by shot, for years to come. (“Drive” was shot by ace cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, whose credits include “Three Kings” and “The Usual Suspects.”)

“Drive” was literally greeted with hoots and howls of joy from the press here, who perhaps felt beaten down by almost two weeks of sober, serious art-house cinema with nary an ass-kicking or supercharged Impala in sight. I felt some of the same exhilaration, but those who are comparing “Drive” to, say, “Pulp Fiction” today are getting overamped on the sea air and sunlight and strong coffee of the Mediterranean. Whatever you think of Tarantino’s 1994 Palme d’Or winner, it literally changed the course of movie history and established a paradigm for indie-film success that hasn’t quite been exorcised 17 years later. “Drive” has neither the outsize ambition nor the Godardian, art-school lack of discipline of that film — and anyway, what happened to “Pulp Fiction” can only happen once. Refn’s breakthrough film is successful in quite a different way, as an injection of clear, cool European technique into a classic American fable of guns, cars, girls and money. I think that’s quite enough.

This makes for an irresistible compare-and-contrast between two extraordinarily talented mid-career cinematic visionaries, starting of course with the fact that Nolan’s movie will have 1,000 times the audience, at a very conservative estimate. (It could be 10,000 times, or 100,000.) “Inception” is largely set inside the world of dreams, which look like conventional Hollywood action movies. “Valhalla Rising” is set in the real world of medieval Britain and North America, at least nominally, but plays from beginning to end like a feverish nightmare.

“Inception” is nothing if not calculated, and while I didn’t like the movie that much I don’t actually mean that as a dig. Nolan is trying to push at the outer edges of blockbuster possibility, while still ensuring he packs the multiplexes deep into next month and makes a profit for his investors (who are in for a reported $200 million or so). Refn has tumbled out of the Viking longboat in the opposite direction; I assume he wants people to watch his movies or he wouldn’t keep making them, but based on his erratic career to date he doesn’t give a crap about commercial considerations and couldn’t make a pop movie — at least not on purpose — to save his life.

Arguably Nolan and Refn are both trying to split the difference between action movies and art-house or independent cinema. But Nolan’s goal is to blend the two to produce smarter-than-average mass entertainment, while Refn erases the distinction in a fashion that seems perversely devoted to driving both constituencies out of the theater. The closest he’s ever gotten to a hit remains his 1996 debut “Pusher,” a sharply observed melodrama set in the grimy criminal underworld of Copenhagen. Eventually he expanded that film into an increasingly dark and grotesque trilogy, but not until after his Hollywood detour with the 2003 John Turturro thriller “Fear X,” one of those debacles that grading-on-a-curve critics like me call an “intriguing failure.”

After the “Pusher” trilogy, Refn made a Miss Marple film for British television — I haven’t seen it, but it’s hard to imagine a weirder combination of director and subject — and then moved on to the dazzling, ultraviolent black comedy “Bronson,” in which he tells the story of a legendary British convict in an arch, frame-breaking style derived (Refn says) from avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. I thought “Bronson” was terrific, but it’s a movie designed to have almost no audience: Let’s take an amoral, testosterone-drenched prison story and tell it as a campy, super-gay art film. The people who like one side of that equation won’t like the other one — or at least won’t want to admit it.

Over the last four or five years Refn has been plugging along on “Valhalla Rising,” which offers spectacular widescreen images of British and American wilderness (I think it was all shot in Scotland) and a completely silent performance from Refn’s “Pusher II” star, Mads Mikkelsen (also the villain in “Casino Royale”), whose one-eyed, tattooed gladiator is so badass he makes Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name look like a Filipino lady-boy.

In the first and arguably best part of the movie, you wonder whether “Valhalla Rising” is going to have any dialogue at all, or any real story. One-Eye is the battered but undefeated fighting slave of some second-rate tribesmen, somewhere in Britain, who put him up against all comers in competitions for food, booze, women, gold or whatever’s available. Lots of movies about the Middle Ages can do the mud and blood — though we sure see a lot of both here — but in this movie it’s like Refn has ripped you out of time and dropped you there. There’s no story because, well, there was no story: You stayed alive as long as you could, any fucking way you could, and that was it.

After One-Eye seizes the chance to kill his captors and escape, leaving alive only the boy of 9 or 10 (Maarten Stevenson) who’s been feeding him, Refn does launch upon a narrative of sorts, even if I kind of wish he didn’t. This is the movie in which we learn exactly how the Vikings discovered America, circa 1000 A.D.: They did a lot of acid, got all hopped-up on Jesus Christ, and took a wrong-way boat they thought was headed for the Holy Land. No, I don’t think Refn is seriously suggesting this as an alternative to the normal historical version involving Leif Erikson and the Vinland Sagas and all that. He’s partly suggesting wild thought-experiment possibilities — wouldn’t it be cool if they thought the people shooting arrows at them were Arabs? Or demons? –and partly just building a trail of red herrings to support his hallucinations, dream sequences and scenes of madness and violent death.

In an interview with Bilge Ebiri at IFC.com, Refn says that “Valhalla Rising” is partly inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” a notoriously impenetrable film that establishes a science-fiction-flavored premise before settling into a steady state of ambient spiritual mind-fuck. That comparison helped me understand this movie better, at least in the sense that I’m not supposed to understand it, that it’s a fugue-state meditation on the medieval encounter between Europe and America rather than a comprehensible yarn that travels from a beginning to an ending.

Part of me still wishes and hopes that Refn will get the opportunity to make something on the scale of “Inception” — but then, it’s not my $200 million. (Nolan could definitely stand to make something with the modest scale, not to mention the total fearlessness, of “Valhalla Rising.”) It’s not as if he hasn’t been noticed; Refn is supposedly making a vehicle-based action film called “Drive” with Ryan Gosling, a “Thai-boxing western” that may star Mikkelsen, and something called “I Walk With the Dead.” (Oh, and “Pusher” is being remade. In England. As a Bollywood movie.) He’s even been rumored as a possible director for a Hollywood “Wonder Woman” picture, which by any reasonable standard is a terrible idea. When it comes to this ridiculously talented and headstrong filmmaker, I’m happy to chuck reason out the window and hope for the best.

“Valhalla Rising” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand via IFC In Theaters, on many cable-TV systems.

“Paranormal Activity” took this year’s Blair Witch Memorial Award for viral-marketed zero-budget hit — grossing well over $100 million to date — and “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” has defied the film industry’s cumulative demographic and marketing wisdom to the tune of $40 million or so. If the major studios’ Indiewood specialty arms are dead or dying, old-fashioned film-festival acquisitions suddenly look like good business again.

My problem, which may be strictly my own, is that I found a lot of this year’s indie hits to be predictable, formulaic and fundamentally uninteresting. The top-grossing foreign-language film of 2009, to date, is “Coco Before Chanel,” a movie I saw and declined to review because it bored me too much. (Anne Fontaine is one of my favorite French directors, but I thought she was poorly matched to star Audrey Tautou and the orthodox biopic material.) Pedro Almodóvar‘s movie-movie noir “Broken Embraces” may wind up giving Fontaine’s film a run for the money, but while I found many of the individual elements in “Broken Embraces” beautiful — the photography, the seriocomic tone, the central performances of Penélope Cruz and Lluís Homar — it never congealed into a satisfying whole. (I’ve been told to see it again, and I plan to.)

One major foreign release still lies ahead: Michael Haneke’s austere black-and-white period piece “The White Ribbon,” already winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the best-film and best-director prizes at the European Film Awards. While it’s a typically dark and enigmatic Haneke work that will surely attract some big-city viewers, it lacks the contemporary setting and the Lynchian combination of violence and mystery that made his “Caché” a surprise hit a few holiday seasons back.

One imported hit that I think is being oddly dismissed by so-called serious critics is Lone Scherfig’s “An Education,” a pitch-perfect pre-feminist coming-of-age fable that ought to make Carey Mulligan a movie star. It struck me as a lovely film with a depth of moral seriousness that’s partly masked by its sets, costumes and charm — and I’m afraid that even in the year of Kathryn Bigelow‘s unexpected resurgence, “An Education” is the victim of some latent sexism.

As for Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” anointed by critics’ groups from coast to coast as an Oscar front-runner, uh … how can I put this? I liked it. I’m a Bigelow fan from way back to “Near Dark.” Way worse things could happen than to see her on the stage of the Kodak Theatre clutching a statuette (and looking fabulous while her ex-husband glowers in the audience) come March. But “The Hurt Locker” just doesn’t speak to me the way the films on this list do. It was terrific, visceral cinema — but I don’t treasure the experience of seeing it, or yearn to repeat it. And let’s face it: While the acting was excellent, the film’s dialogue, what little there was of it, was Michael Bay-grade awful.

So what about the movies I did like? From the Hollywood-financial point of view, it’s a whole lotta nothing. Only two movies on my list grossed more than $1 million in the United States — and only one of those made it past $2 million. I’ve got two films by American directors, only one of them made in the U.S. I swear, none of this was deliberate. I’m not consciously trying to come off like that snotty, unshaven alt-weekly critic from 1989, talking up Balkan-dialect movies nobody but him has ever seen. (I wasn’t even that guy in 1989, or not exactly.)

I do think, however, that the aesthetic conservatism that dominates American cinema at the moment — expressed on the indie fringes by a talky, unadventurous and fatally dull strain of neorealism — has taken its toll on me. I’m like a junkie GI who’s come home from Saigon and discovered to his dismay that the shit on the streets just ain’t strong enough, man! Screw these movies where people with bad haircuts sit around and drone on about their relationships, humorously or otherwise! I want Filipina transgender hookers, imitation mid-’60s crime flicks, opaque Argentine class warfare, mean-spirited Jewish fables and the completely inappropriate glorification of violent British convicts! And here they are.

Seriously, though — I didn’t put any movies on this list because I respected them. Fuck that for a game of darts, as my late Uncle Liam said on many occasions. These are the movies that dazzled me this year, that disoriented me and shifted my reality prism and messed with my head. If in most cases hardly anybody else saw them or liked them, if the great humming and coughing steamroller of defective late capitalism squished them flat without even noticing, that is strictly not my fault. Happy happies, everybody. I’ll catch you on the flippety-flop.

“Hunger“ — British visual artist Steve McQueen’s debut feature, about the Bobby Sands-IRA hunger strikes of the early 1980s, is so implausible on so many levels it’s a wonder it works at all. Straddling the boundary between narrative and experimental cinema, between pure visuals and talky drama, between Terrence Malick and, say, Sean O’Casey, “Hunger” is in fact one of the decade’s true breakthroughs. Plus, people on all sides of the Irish-British debate disliked it, which suggests McQueen was doing something right.

“Bronson“ — Another fact-based British drama that isn’t anything like what you’d think when you hear that phrase. Nicolas Winding Refn’s operatic, visionary work about the legendary, ultra-violent English convict who took the name Charlie Bronson shamelessly breaks all the rules and wears a pathological obsession with Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange” on its sleeve. I shouldn’t rank it remotely this high, but I will anyway.

“Il Divo“ — Rigorous, adventurous and explosive, Paolo Sorrentino’s remarkable film takes the cinematic bravado of Martin Scorsese and the technical wizardry of David Fincher and applies them to the indecipherable story of Giulio Andreotti, the fabled “Black Pope” of 20th-century Italian politics. Part of the dazzling renaissance of Italian cinema, which may look sudden from here but has been brewing for a while. (See “Gomorrah,” below.)

“A Serious Man“ — I blow hot and cold on the Coens, but even their weaker films (e.g., “Burn After Reading,” “The Ladykillers“) reward repeat viewings — and their better films reward them even more. This utterly delicious black-comic Jewish fable, set in a middle-class Midwestern suburb in the ’60s (a place that still carries buried undertones of Eastern European shtetl) is among their funniest and darkest films, both humane and ruthless in a way that’s highly Coen-specific. As the last shot faded to black, I sat up in my seat and said, “Oh my fucking God!” Which is precisely right.

“The White Ribbon” — Michael Haneke’s enigmatic and violent black-and-white yarn, set in rural Germany just before World War I, doesn’t open until Dec. 30. I’ll get to it then in more detail, but as is customary with the chilly Austrian-born director, “The White Ribbon” is a slippery fish. Ostensibly a parable about the roots of fascism, it’s also a tale of faith, punishment, love and the petty cruelties of ordinary life. It’s another of Haneke’s unresolvable shaggy-dog mysteries, and simultaneously the most beautiful, most chilling and most forgiving of them.

“The Limits of Control“ — People I know mostly either loved or hated Jim Jarmusch’s stylish and surprisingly political twist on the ’60s European crime film, driven by Spanish settings, Christopher Doyle’s gorgeous photography and Isaach De Bankolé’s iconic star presence and devastating wardrobe. Seriously, what’s not to like? But then, I don’t think this movie is about its conclusion (which some find dogmatic) or its reiterative-fragments-of-dialogue story. It’s more like a Bach fugue, and it’s about the moments, the silences, the faces and bodies and clothes, the endless cups of coffee. One of the indie pioneer’s best ever.

“Serbis“ — Based on the horrified word of mouth at Cannes in 2008, I didn’t see Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s heartwarming family saga set in a dead-end porn theater until this year, when it had a very brief Stateside appearance. Last time I depend on gossip from a pack of prudish Europeans! Sure, the Family theater (yuk, yuk) is about the sleaziest place in the world — and the film includes one legendarily disgusting scene — but Mendoza’s portrayal of the struggling family behind it, and the diverse and colorful sex trade it supports, has tremendous lyricism and compassion.

“35 Shots of Rum“ — With virtually no audience outside France, Claire Denis has become that nation’s leading chronicler of social change and dislocation. This hushed, minimalist portrait of an Afro-French father and daughter on the Parisian fringes may be Denis’ loveliest and most challenging film. “35 Shots of Rum” builds slowly toward an enormous emotional payoff, and along the way offers one of the most heartbreaking and unlikely uses of a pop song in film history (the song in question being the Commodores’ “Night Shift”).

“Gomorrah“ — In adapting a nonfiction book by Roberto Saviano about the Camorra (or Neapolitan mafia), Italian director Matteo Garrone draws on his nation’s rich cinematic history for this big-canvas social drama that invokes Antonioni, Fellini and Francis Coppola. A spectacular big-screen accomplishment, whose gorgeous bleakness is well-captured in a brand-new two-disc special edition DVD from the Criterion Collection.

“The Headless Woman“ — Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s gorgeous and deeply troubling ’70s class-warfare drama was booed at Cannes, which is way beyond ironic given its themes of blind privilege and willful ignorance. Martel tries to break through the language of conventional film and show us how her central character, an upper-middle-class blond woman (María Onetto), lapses into amnesia rather than face the consequences of her own borderline-criminal conduct. Like every other film on this list, “Headless Woman” compels a second viewing — and then compels you to recognize that it’s shown you things you still don’t understand. (Now available on DVD from Strand Releasing.)

Honorable mentions (alphabetical): Lars von Trier’s bloody, beautiful and fatally insane “Antichrist“ established, in case anyone was wondering, that he no longer has an American audience; Andrew Bujalski’s “Beeswax“ was ignored by both the hipster audience that used to like him and the grown-up audience that should; Almodóvar’s “Broken Embraces,” on which see above; Scherfig’s “An Education,” also discussed above; Terry Gilliam’s gorgeous and daring “Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” with a wonderful last performance by Heath Ledger; Götz Spielmann’s twisty Euro-noir “Revanche“; Carlos Reygadas’ Mexican-Mennonite adultery drama “Silent Light“; Nina Paley’s irrepressible (and uncopyrighted!) feminist take on the “Ramayana,” “Sita Sings the Blues“; Pablo Larraín’s demented Pinochet-era disco fable “Tony Manero“; Zack Snyder’s brooding, black-comic “Watchmen.”

Check in tomorrow for Andrew O’Hehir’s picks for best movie of the decade.