Writing about a movie without resorting to cliches is difficult.

What's the story about? An unnamed driver, Los Angeles - almost always at night, and a robbery gone wrong.

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn e starring Ryan Gosling as 'the Driver', Drive takes Los Angeles and makes it darker.

Driver rarely talks and hardly ever smiles. During the day, he's a Hollywood stunt driver and a mechanic. At night, he moonlights as getaway driver. His seemingly flat personality makes him ironically more interesting. And he essentially outshines all other characters.

There's Nino (Ron Perlman), a wannabe Italian mobster; and Bernie Rose, a wannabe gentleman gangster who's more violent than he cares to admit.

And then of course there's Irene (Carey Mulligan), mother, wife of a convincted felon and the driver's love interest.

Ryan Gosling's performance gave us a silent and stoic protagonist.

More to the point, Drive is an amazing movie because it removes cliches from a heavily cliched plot: Los Angeles + gangasters.

Drive is different, it mostly relies on quotable but sparse movie lines and amazing visuals.

Like the best scene in a movie, Driver and Irene driving into the sunset along the dry LA River.

And by the way, this movie indirectly marked the end of an era.

It was filmed in the late 2010s and, shortly thereafter, the city of Los Angeles lost the signature yellow glow of its lightbulbs in favour of a more surgically white, 'autopsy-table shine' (that's what CNN called them 11 years ago) from the LEDs.