Andrew O’Hehir, Salon film critic: I suspect it’s really a combination of both of those things. It’s both too elliptical and too violent, and it may have been positioned incorrectly in the marketplace. This is a movie tailor-made for contemporary American critics, who are steeped simultaneously in the culture of Eurocentric art-house movies and in Hollywood B cinema of the ’70s and ’80s, all the stuff that inspired Quentin Tarantino. Although I have argued forcefully that “Drive” is not “Pulp Fiction,” for a whole bunch of reasons, there’s no denying that it belongs to a similar tradition. But the thing is, the general public really doesn’t share that peculiar combination of rarefied and populist taste, you might say. And “Drive” may seem quite mysterious to many people. It isn’t really much of an action film, even though there is considerable violence. The hero and the girl never get it on, and barely even kiss. It may be the most chaste and sexless R-rated film in history. It has, let’s just say, a highly indeterminate conclusion, with the fate of the protagonist very uncertain.

T.R.: Based on my own experiences, and the experiences of other people I’ve spoken to who’ve seen the film, I do think the biggest word-of-mouth problem for the film is the many, many horrible things that happen to people’s throats, hands, eyes and heads in it. The way I describe it to people, and the way other people have described it to me, is that “Drive” is a very good movie that I never, ever want to see again. I should disclose that I have a very low tolerance for both fork-related violence and eye-related violence, and that this movie happens to combine both of those things in a very unpleasant way at one point. But I saw the movie in a sold-out screening in New York, sitting next to two 19-year-old women who, based on their chatter, went to see it because it had Ryan Gosling in it. By the time the first person’s head exploded, 45 minutes in, they just started traumatically screaming, which echoed my own internal experience. I guess the question becomes, though, what makes this movie’s violence more unpalatable to audiences than, for example, the violence in the “Saw” movies, which tend to do fairly well at the box office?

A.O’H.: That’s an interesting question. I think the promotional campaign has highlighted the film’s style, which is gloriously accomplished, and suggests a kind of slick, sexy adventure featuring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan and Christina Hendricks, something that’s going to be fun and not too serious, rather than a film with forks in eyeballs and exploding heads. Like, basically a “Fast & Furious” sequel with more aesthetic ambition and a better cast. For better or worse, American audiences have been conditioned to expect certain kinds of narratives with certain rhythms, and this movie openly defies that. While most critics have embraced it, I would point to the counter-example of Open Salon blogger Scott Mendelson, who is a staunch defender of mainstream, audience-pleasing Hollywood cinema. He totally hated “Drive,” and found it pretentious and unbearable. So here we are once again thrown back on the fact that people who watch hundreds of films a year, generally speaking, develop different tastes and different expectations from people who see a small fraction of that number. Vincent Canby of the New York Times said this years ago: You can’t watch 350 films a year and not become a specialist, of some kind.

For many critics — and I’m not sure, I may belong to this contingent, though I hope I don’t — extreme violence is first and foremost an aesthetic or stylistic element. Those of us who watch a lot of international genre movies have seen Korean gangster films or Italian horror movies that make the violence in “Drive” seem relatively tame. I kind of hate to tell you this, but at the Cannes premiere there was cheering and applause, even some laughter, after the head-explosion scene. I mean, I think it genuinely did startle and affect people, right in the moment, but then a split second later, the reaction was more like: Well done! You got us! What an awesome combination of, I don’t know, early Kubrick and ’70s grindhouse! It was as if the actual effect of the horrific violence quickly got turned into a more intellectual or analytical reaction.

T.R.: That’s odd. I found the violence in “Drive” to be the most disturbing I’ve seen in a movie in a very long time. I’ve seen a couple of Nicolas Refn’s previous movies and liked them even though they were brutal. But they were very stylized. This one struck me as particularly visceral, partly because of the slow buildup and its more realistic aesthetic, and partly because, as you mentioned, on its surface it seems like such a “Hollywood” movie. Yet the violence is extraordinarily graphic in a way you rarely see in something that is not a gritty foreign crime movie or a grindhouse film, or a horror movie.

I’m kind of fascinated by the target demographic of the movie — like, who’s supposed to see it in the first place? There are people who are going to see it because of Ryan Gosling, but I feel like the normal Ryan Gosling audience isn’t all that fond of seeing someone stomp people to death. The movie has these gay movie references — mostly to Kenneth Anger’s underground film “Scorpio Rising” — but there’s really nothing overtly gay about it. The title sequence has this campy 1980s lettering, which is duplicated in the film’s ad campaign — and a hilarious, awesome fake-’80s synth score — which makes it seem like it might have a romance or comedy element to it. But the film’s only sex scene involves two people touching a stick shift, and there’s probably only one joke in it. I think, basically, this movie manages to frustrate everybody’s expectations of it — to its great credit. I mean, it really is quite good. But then, I’m not sure anybody should be surprised if it bombs.

A.O’H.: I think that’s a very good summary, and it sums up not just the problems with this film — the marketing and P.R. problems with this film, that is to say — but also the problematic relationship between film critics and the general public. Critics, generally speaking, get most excited by seeing something they haven’t seen before, even if that very often means, as in this case, a fusion of familiar ingredients whose net effect is unfamiliar. Moviegoing audiences who are forking out 10 or 12 bucks on Saturday night generally want to see something they have seen before, delivered expertly and well constructed, maybe with a neat narrative twist or some hot new actors. It’s more complicated than that, of course, in that there are many films that satisfy both constituencies. But “Drive” seems to belong to the same category as “The American,” Anton Corbijn’s hit-man movie with George Clooney from a year ago, which was also pretty much an art film in disguise. I suppose the audience feels it has been promised one thing and delivered something quite different. And, you know, I can sympathize with that. They’re probably right.

Andrew O’Hehir is Salon’s film critic.

Ultra-violent and ultra-stylish, “Drive” stood out amid this year’s Cannes and Toronto lineups for its calculated, hard-edged brilliance. It’s both frankly commercial and sneakily artistic. Refn and Gosling clearly aspired to make a big international hit that critics could also love, but “Drive” might also become one of those genre-geek fetish objects that doesn’t connect with a mass audience. Earlier this year at Cannes, “Drive” was the talk of the festival, and it’s no wonder. The history of that festival is all about the long cinematic collaboration between Europe and America, and “Drive” distills that into one concise, intense and exciting movie.

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. He gives an awesome, almost iconic performance, but it isn’t the one that will eventually win him an Oscar. (Gosling may have a better chance this year in “The Ides of March,” but that one doesn’t feel quite right either.)

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.

The wrong girl, in this case, is Carey Mulligan (an Oscar nominee for “An Education” two years back), 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, shall we say, explosive 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 an unforgettable turn from filmmaker and comedian Albert Brooks as an urbane-seeming but remarkably sinister crime boss, Ron Perlman as a low-rent, pizzeria-owning Jewish gangster, 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, maybe light-years, ahead of those 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? Your answer to that question will probably determine how you feel about this movie. “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.”)

To some degree, the way “Drive” has been widely embraced by critics reflects some underlying anxiety among my profession, where people often feel that they’re alienated from popular taste, and are left to extol the virtues of “cultural vegetables” that only a few bedhead masochists actually want to eat. “Drive” was literally greeted with hoots and howls of joy from the Cannes press, and I understood that exhilaration. But those who have called “Drive” the next “Pulp Fiction” are getting overexcited. Whatever you think of Tarantino’s 1994 Palme d’Or winner, it literally changed the course of movie history and established a seductive paradigm for indie-film success that hasn’t quite been exorcised 17 years later. “Drive” is a brilliant film, after its fashion, but it doesn’t have the bigger-than-life pop sensibility or the Godardian lack of discipline of “Pulp Fiction.” It’s a breakthrough of an entirely different kind, an injection of clear, cool European technique into a classic American fable of guns, cars, girls and money. I think that’s quite enough.

Shot largely in the Sepedi language in a remote South African town called Elandsdoorn, “Life, Above All” follows the difficult adolescence of Chanda, played by the amazing first-time actress Khomotso Manyaka, a lovely young woman with a sober, centered manner. After her infant sister dies of an unknown illness, Chanda begins to understand that her mother, Lillian (Lerato Mvelase), is also getting sick and that no one in Elandsdoorn wants to talk about it honestly. Their neighbor, Mrs. Tafa (the impressive Harriet Manamela), who owns both a television and a telephone and serves as the village’s main conduit of information, seems suspiciously devoted to developing cover stories for the baby’s death and Lillian’s absence.

Things rapidly go from bad to worse: Lillian’s on-and-off boyfriend Jonah (Aubrey Poolo), who is apparently the dead child’s father but not Chanda’s, shows up deathly ill and full of bitterness, literally dumped from a cart in the family’s front yard. Chanda’s best friend Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), a barely pubescent girl, gives up on school and starts turning tricks in a truck stop. Then there’s the taciturn and puritanical Aunt Lizbet (another terrific performance, by Tinah Mnumzana), who arrives after a long bus ride, largely to complain about her aches and pains and declare that the whole thing is God’s judgment and entirely to be expected.

It’s the indomitable Chanda, determined to hold what’s left of her family together, rescue Esther and defy the implacable Mrs. Tafa and the hostile villagers, who stops the whole thing from becoming utterly depressing. For example, because Chanda can read, she recognizes that a so-called doctor who proposes to treat her mother is in reality a salesman for expensive nutritional supplements. She also knows from her schooling that there is medicine that can help people with HIV, although whether you can actually get it in a place like Elandsdoorn is another matter.

“Life, Above All” is trying to send a message of hope about an epidemic that has killed millions and will probably kill millions more, and while that’s a tough sell it’s probably a worthy one. Improving education and healthcare in Africa, even incrementally, might produce Chandas by the hundreds of thousands, young people with the tools and resources to lift themselves and their loved ones out of dire peril. I certainly hope that’s true, and Schmitz’s straightforward and handsomely made movie effectively carries the message that poor people in a faraway village most of us will never know about, let alone see, live their lives with dignity and complexity and shape their own destinies as best they can.

“Life, Above All” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow. 

This is a work of almost ascetic severity, shot entirely inside the Mexico City apartment of a freelance journalist named Laura (played by the marvelous Mónica del Carmen). But somehow “Leap Year” uncovers an entire world, recounting a sweeping psychological narrative of a woman’s descent into delusion, sexual obsession and self-destruction and then her voyage out again. Focusing on the details of everyday life with a camera that rarely moves, Rowe manages to make Laura’s story both gripping and dramatic. Cinephiles will surely recognize the influence of, say, Yasujiro Ozu, Chantal Akerman and Roman Polanski here, along with the sexual frankness of ’70s and ’80s European film, but it’s not like you need a graduate degree to absorb this simple, direct and almost wordless tale. (Several critics have compared this to “Last Tango in Paris,” and while I guess that’s inescapable it’s not fair to either film.)

“Leap Year” won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes last year (given to the festival’s best debut film), and many people were startled to discover that a film that seems so steeped in the subtleties of class, race and culture in Mexico was directed by an Australian. It’s probably fairer to say that Rowe has an immigrant’s sensibility: He’s been living and working in Mexico for 17 years, and wrote the script in Spanish (with co-writer Lucía Carreras), but the ruthless observation in “Leap Year” also has a feeling of outsiderness. His central character, Laura, is a bit of an outsider too, even if she looks stereotypically Mexican. She’s a dark-skinned mestiza (meaning that her features and physique look more Indian than European), short in stature, with a curvaceous frame. But she’s also an educated, middle-class professional who has left her home village in Oaxaca far behind. She spends her days doing piecework journalism on the Internet, and her nights either masturbating while watching her married, affluent neighbors across the street or bringing home men she’ll never see again.

There’s a sharp distinction between Laura’s life as she’d like to imagine it and as it really is, something I expect everyone who’s ever lived on their own in a big city can identify with. She tells her mother she’s having dinner with a friend when she’s watching TV, and that she’s cooked a steak when she’s having beans out of the can. For one of her lovers she spins out an urban fantasy about her apartment building: How she sometimes has coffee with the older couple who live downstairs, or takes the kids from No. 6 to the fair when their parents are busy. None of it’s true; as far as we can tell she doesn’t even know those people. But at least she’s talking to this guy. We never see the face of the first guy she brings home (Juan Manuel Sepúlveda’s camera stays focused on a cockroach scuttling across the floor, perhaps too symbolically), and the second one only speaks when he’s calling to reassure his wife that he’s on his way home.

The one she ultimately talks to is the first one to volunteer his name, Arturo (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), and he’s the tall, imperious, European-looking type that Laura clearly prefers. Rowe has said that the racial element of the story is important, and it’s certainly a definitional element of Mexican life, albeit one that usually isn’t discussed. He also likes it rough, and while we’re just talking about R-rated kink at first (spanking and so on), Laura likes it and is eager for him to push further. A whole lot further, as it turns out, further than Arturo necessarily wants to go. The sex scenes in “Leap Year,” by the way, are explicit and realistic, but a bit detached and not purposefully alluring. (This also isn’t “real” sex, in the sense of those quasi-pornographic French art films.) Sepúlveda’s camera remains at a distance, whether Laura and Arturo are screwing or role-playing or just snuggling on the sofa, which is where they break the real taboo between them.

Rowe’s point, as I take it, is that the real danger for a solitary urban woman like Laura is to reveal your need and loneliness, your desire for an intimate connection that will break through the atomized, depersonalized landscape. Letting a guy you barely know whip you with his belt will leave some bruises, but those will heal in a few days, while the consequences of emotional vulnerability can be genuinely catastrophic. Let me reassure you that while “Leap Year” goes to some profoundly troubling places, it’s not, in the end, some utterly dark fable of misogyny or nihilism. Arturo is a cipher or a mystery — Laura doesn’t learn much about him, and may not want to — but he isn’t a monster, and there’s a desperate, haunting tenderness to their story of uncontrollable love and its ending.

“Leap Year” is now playing at the Cinema Village in New York, and opens July 1 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, with more cities and DVD release to follow. 

Muntean opens the movie with a long, seemingly sunny, single-take scene of the likable, silver-haired Paul (Mimi Brănescu) in bed with the young, blond Raluca (Maria Popistaşu). They’re naked and have clearly just made love; the filmmaker is counting on the fact that we’ll be drawn in by the post-coital mood and by the beautiful female nude, presented almost as an art-history odalisque. At first we don’t know anything about Paul and Raluca’s relationship, but something in their tentative talk of the future and in Paul’s manner — simultaneously cajoling and manipulative — begins to fill in the blanks. When Raluca utters the name “Adriana” the scene’s mood shifts. We’ll meet Adriana (Mirela Oprişor), a petite, intense brunette, shortly. She’s the wife, and Raluca is the other woman.

All of “Tuesday, After Christmas” is shot this way, in extended, carefully choreographed takes rich with dialogue, that feel almost like live theater. There are some devastating Chekhov-comedy collisions in the middle scenes, but the three characters come together only once, when Adriana shows up for a conference about her daughter’s orthodontia, completely unaware that the woman attaching the braces is also screwing her husband. (Raluca later refers to this scene as a “close encounter of the third kind,” and it does possess an almost out-of-body character.) I didn’t try to count, but there can’t be many more than, say, two dozen shots in the entire movie. But Muntean’s impressive technique never feels like an end in itself; it’s more like he creates a transparent window that brings us face to face with the inescapable moral issues within Paul’s quandary. And make no mistake, this is a moral fable, disarmingly simple and fatefully complicated, about a basically decent and honest guy who is treating his marriage and family like a commodity, to be traded in for a newer, shinier model.

On the one hand, Paul has fallen in love with Raluca, as he eventually confesses to Adriana, and in Woody Allen’s famous words, the heart wants what it wants. Most viewers, male or female, will identify with Paul’s predicament to some degree (if we’re being honest with ourselves). And you don’t want to resort to clichés like “he’s forgotten what’s really important in life”; I don’t think Muntean is arguing that personal happiness or erotic love don’t matter, or that people should stay married if they’re miserable. Issues that might be central in a different kind of movie are deliberately not addressed in this one, which focuses entirely on a few fateful days in the Yuletide season. Is Paul actively unhappy with Adriana, or just bored and restless? Does Raluca want to marry Paul and start a new family? Has this dumb bastard actually thought about the pain he’s inflicting on his wife and daughter, or about the basic principle that what goes around is likely to come around?

By declining to address those questions, and by making Paul more of a sympathetic figure than a villain or an incurable rogue, Muntean is actually twisting the knife way more deeply. I’m sure that in Romania “Tuesday, After Christmas” reads like an indictment of a particular class, and of the so-called freedom that came after the 1989 revolution, but outsiders shouldn’t confuse that with nostalgia for the Ceausescu dictatorship. (I’m pretty sure the number of Romanians who feel that way is zero.) More broadly this is a resonant, vivid and finally heartbreaking tale about the universal difficulty of marriage and the endless self-delusion of the human condition, driven by a trio of amazing dramatic performances. Best of all is Oprişor as the devastated but ferocious Adriana, who tells Paul, “You are the biggest disappointment of my life,” and then must go through all the Santa Claus rituals of one last family Christmas.

“Tuesday, After Christmas” is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with other cities and DVD release to follow.