rated R

There’s a great line in “Drive” wherein Albert Brooks, playing a washed-up movie producer who’s fallen into some questionably criminal company, mentions the films he used to make back in the day. “One critic called them ‘European.’” he says. “I thought they were shit.” It’s a great comment on the movie he’s currently in, which is bound to confound the average American motorhead hoping for another installment in the “Faster” and “Drive Angry” legacy. Written by Hossein Amini, an Iranian born screenwriter whose successes lie mostly with British literary dramas, and directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, this is decidedly not like those other car films.

“Languid” is not a word typically associated with a fuel-injected crime thriller, but “Drive” is exactly that. Refn’s camera simply caresses the neon Los Angeles landscape, drifting meditatively to a gentle, sighing, ’80s-infused synth score, evoking feelings more along the lines of “Blade Runner” than “Gone in 60 Seconds.” Far more art than action, Refn’s direction shows no fear of silence, and like the best noir narratives, allows the shadows to tell the story, isolation to define the romance and, in properly European fashion, for mysteries to be answered by more questions.

rated R

How is it that a simple savage warrior from the imaginary realm of Hyborea could endure in the popular consciousness for eight decades? It might be that his creator, Robert E. Howard, distilling the anxieties of an era of economic strife and cultural distrust, tapped into something visceral and archetypical with his blatant escape into raw, snarling, masculinity.

Conan, warrior nomad, pirate poet and self-made king, has always been a true antihero, a conqueror of men, a lover of women, a relentless natural force unafraid to face unbeatable odds. However, wearing his barbarism like a crown, he is pointedly a champion for the unrefined, a broadsword cowboy furiously defending against encroaching forces of sophistication. A child of cheap pulp rags and, later, even cheaper comic books (the most successful of them, “Savage Sword of Conan” in the 1970s, couldn’t afford to even print in color), Conan, let’s face it, is nothing less than every known male insecurity turned inside out and empowered. He’s custom built to appeal to underdeveloped dudes who A) probably wouldn’t have much more than a dollar to throw at literary distraction, B) have never heard the word insecurity in their lives, and C) would most likely stomp on its neck if they met it behind a truck stop. It should come as no major shock, then, that the latest incarnation of “Conan the Barbarian” would be no less than a ripped-out, chest-beating frat party celebrating all things dumb, crude and classless.