Drive is the best Michael Mann movie I’ve seen in a long time, and I mean that with deep affection. For a moment, deep in the Reagan era, Michael Mann’s aesthetic owned our imaginations. Soulful gazing at the horizon, rain-slicked streets, meditative shots of city lights bouncing off a car’s hood. Add in a moody but approachable pop soundtrack and you’ve got magic. The look and deliberate pacing of projects like Miami Vice and Thief were emulated everywhere – music videos, commercials, the lot.

Nicholas Winding Refn has meticulously and reverently lifted that formula and made an only-so-slightly update for modern audiences who know nothing of Crockett and Tubbs. Ryan Gosling plays a Steve McQueen-ish stunt driver who loans his skills to criminals for the rush of it. He doesn’t speak much. He does most of his communication by staring and minute adjustments to his tough-guy toothpick.

I could tell you what happens, but in a movie like this it hardly matters. There is trouble, and there are double-crosses, and there is thwarted love. There is action and silent bad-assery. There is a jacket that apparently cannot be laundered, despite its ever increasing vileness. In a movie like Drive, it’s all about the atmospherics, and they work in spades. This is the best movie of 1986.

Special mentions to Albert Brooks cast perfectly as the reluctant heavy and the location crew’s ability to find a piece of LA I don’t remember seeing in a movie. That’s gotta be the hardest job in movies.