Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling — stuntman, wheelman, real man — channels Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn provides the highly stylized Los Angeles backdrop and brutal violence. Even better, Albert Brooks exacts some of it.

d: Nicolas Winding Refn | imdb.com | trailer | Get away
He’s a good guy. | My hands are dirty. | Put him behind the wheel.

Contagion (2011)

Steven Soderbergh directs an international thriller about a pandemic that kills millions of people in a few months, capturing all the ensuing paranoia, as if Hitchcock came back to make one of those zombie apocalypse movies. But Jude Law is just awful.

d: Steven Soderbergh | imdb.com | trailer | Charlie Rose
Don’t touch anything. | I think I’m sick. | It came from here.