Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
I can’t believe it’s been thirteen years since this movie was first released. In my mind I remembered it so clearly but on rewatch, I realized how much I’d forgotten. It’s not, as I thought it was, as much of a riff on the kind of ascetic discipline that Michael Mann perfected in movies like “Thief” as much as it is a series of impressionistic tone poems—long, still shots and spare, deliberate dialog. I hadn’t yet seen Walter Hill’s “The Driver” when I saw this for the first time, but I’m not even sure this is much closer to Hill’s template. For better or worse, this is clearly Refn’s voice and vision. It’s too bad he has yet to follow it up convincingly.
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