Review: The Fall Guy (2024)

Director: David Leitch 

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham 

Tough guys have feelings, too, and who better to explore those than Ryan Gosling, spending a second summer deconstructing the idea of masculinity – albeit not in quite as overt a fashion as he did in Barbie. Nor quite as successfully, judging by the box office, which is a shame because The Fall Guy is a hell of a lot of fun. Combining action – and making the case for good, old fashioned practical stunts – comedy and romance, it’s the kind of movie that should have something for everyone.

Review: First Man (2018)

* * * 1/2
Director: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy

With First Man Damien Chazelle tells the epic story of the moon landing on a deeply intimate scale. At times it feels more like a domestic drama about a family suffocating under the weight of grief both real and anticipated than a retelling of the dangerous work of figuring out how to send human beings off of earth and onto another astronomical body and then bring them back - though, make no mistake, the film is nevertheless invested in showing the painstaking process of trial and error that resulted in NASA's triumph. Anchored by a great performance from Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, with the supporting ranks full of solid performances themselves, First Man is a thoughtful, sometimes even powerful, film about one of the defining events not only of the 20th century, but of human history itself.

Review: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

* * *
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Ryan Gosling

At the risk of losing my movie nerd cred, I have to admit that I don't particularly care for the original Blade Runner. I can't remember which version it was that I saw (I know it wasn't the one with the voice-over, but that still leaves six other versions), but I remember find it overall... boring. That makes me both the worst and the best possible audience for the late-coming sequel Blade Runner 2049. The worst because it took a lot to get me to the theater to see it (the nearly 3 hour running time didn't help), the best because I didn't watch it while gnashing my teeth over the ways that it departs from/doesn't live up to the original. I liked it - mostly. There are some elements that I had issue with, but I never felt less than engaged with the movie and I think that it's a solid (and breathtakingly beautiful looking) science fiction drama.

Review: La La Land (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling

Sometimes all that matters is how a movie makes you feel. At a time of year when just about everything at the cineplex, and some of the things outside of the cineplex, is just so heavy, a movie like La La Land, so light, so breezy, so determined to win your affection, is sometimes exactly what you need. By no means a film without flaws, it's nevertheless an utter charmer that put a smile on my face more times than I could count and left me feeling better about this crazy world of ours than any other film I've seen in months. From an opening which hearkens back to Hollywood's past by promising a picture in CinemaScope before moving into a lively opening number set during a traffic jam, to a finale which lovingly references An American in Paris, Funny Face, and Singin' in the Rain, with a seemingly endless list of things in between that manage to be adorable for their worship of old Hollywood rather than annoyingly precious, La La Land is a film that's in it to win you over and does so fairly easily.

Review: The Nice Guys (2016)

* * *
Director: Shane Black
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe

There are moments in The Nice Guys where you watch Ryan Gosling's performance and think, "Is this about to go too far?" The performance is so broadly comedic that it threatens at times to cross the line from being genuinely funny to trying too hard to be funny to actually be funny. Fortunately director (and co-writer) Shane Black is always able to keep him on the right side of that line, reeling him back in whenever it seems like he's about to drift away. The performance is ridiculous, but it's ridiculous in exactly the right way and in what is ultimately a very funny and very good comedy/noir/buddy movie mashup.

Review: The Big Short (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: Adam McKay
Starring: Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling

Writer/director Adam McKay is best known for his broad comedies, having now made several with Will Farrell (both Anchorman movies, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys), so on the surface he might not seem like the obvious choice to tell a story about the 2008 financial crisis which resulted in the collapse and subsequent bailout of the United States' major banks. However, if The Big Short wasn't a comedy, its story would be too damn depressing to watch. McKay, who adapted the screenplay with Charles Randolph from the book of the same title by Michael Lewis, takes a self-referential, aside-heavy approach to the story that, in its way, seeks to be educational in addition to entertaining and largely succeeds. It's just sort of a shame that the inescapable fact of the story is that, in the end, the joke isn't on any of the characters in the film (or the real people some of them are based on) but on all of us.

Review: Lost River (2015)

* 1/2
Director: Ryan Gosling
Starring: Iain De Caestecker, Christina Hendricks, Saorise Ronan, Matt Smith

A flaming bicycle speeding past. A door shaped like a demon mouth, making it look like those who enter it are being devoured. The head of a dinosaur crashing through a windshield. A girl riding high above the ground, perched atop an easy chair set up in the back of a convertible. Ryan Gosling's directorial debut Lost River is full of dynamic images, but the film itself fails to live up to them. Emotionally and narratively inert, and confusing "weird" for "compelling," Lost River is a film that unfolds without any real sense of purpose and instead plays more like a fan tribute to Gosling's favorite filmmakers, with heavy emphasis on David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn. Gosling will no doubt make another movie as a director someday, but hopefully by that time his sense of identity as a filmmaker will have developed as much as his eye for strange beauty.

Review: Only God Forgives (2013)

* *
Director: Nicholas Winding Refn
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Vithaya Pansringarm, Kristin Scott Thomas

The beautiful room is empty. In a Bangkok soaked with red even when it isn’t dripping with blood, writer/director Nicholas Winding Refn sets a tale of revenge and reprisal in desperate need of a pulse. Even in scenes of its most brutal violence, Only God Forgives sits lifelessly on the screen, gorgeously, artistically mounted, but absolutely empty and devoid of purpose. Although I admire Refn’s boldness and willingness to take risks, this movie is an exercise in form without the developed narrative framework to hang it on and flesh it out.

Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

*
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Starring: Josh Brolin, Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone

Lurid. That’s Gangster Squad in one word. Full of violence as stylized as it is gratuitous, characters so undercooked that even a cast full of fine actors can’t breach their inherent artificiality, and dialogue that sounds like a twelve-year-old’s idea of classic Hollywood sophistication, the film has shockingly little to recommend it. Sure, it contains some cool looking shots, but that can hardly make up for the fact that it’s a failure on pretty much every level.

Review: The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

* * 1/2
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes

The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance’s follow up to 2010’s masterpiece of domestic anguish Blue Valentine, cannot be said to lack in ambition. It wants to tell a story that is at once epic, echoing through multiple generations, and intimate, a tale grounded in the relationships between fathers and sons. What it lacks, at least to a small degree, is the focus necessary to successfully tell a story of that breadth. Split into three distinct phases, each one ultimately suffers from diminishing returns, so that while it begins very strong, it sort of falls apart at the end.

Review: The Ides of March (2011)

* * * 1/2
Director: George Clooney
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, George Clooney, Evan Rachel Wood, Marissa Tomei

"Because how one ought to live is so far removed from how one lives that he who lets go of what is done for that which one ought to do sooner learns ruin than his own preservation: because a man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good. Because of this it is necessary for a prince, wanting to maintain himself, to learn how to be able to be not good and to use this and not use it according to necessity."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Review: Drive (2011)

* * * *
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks

He's a driver. It's what he does and who he is, no more, no less. Taking its cue from its protagonist, Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, based on a novel of the same name by James Sallis, launches itself along a deliberate, no frills trajectory, working its way towards the only ending that a story like this could possibly have. That feeling of predetermination, however, does nothing to detract from how thrilling the film is and it comes to transcend the boundaries of its genre. Drive is the rare action movie in which you find yourself actually caring about the characters and what will happen to them.

Review: Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

* * *
Director: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa
Starring: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone

Not many movies combine sweetness and cynicism as well or as winningly as Crazy, Stupid, Love. This is a movie that knows the score when it comes to relationships and their complications, that doesn't count on romantic illusions, but still has the audacity to hope for them. With a strong screenplay by Dan Fogelman and a fantastic cast of actors, Crazy, Stupid, Love is one of the rare delights of the post-summer blockbuster, pre-autumn Oscar bait part of the movie season.

Review: Lars and the Real Girl

There are comedies that work because they have contempt for their characters and openly invite us to mock and scorn them, and there are comedies that work because their love for their characters is so absolute, that the audience can’t help but fall in love with them, too. Lars and the Real Girl is a film full of such warmth and kindness that you never want it to be over.

Lars (Ryan Gosling) is a shy and awkward person who lives in the garage beside the family home where his brother, Gus (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law, Karin (Emily Mortimer), live and are expecting their first baby. Lars keeps to himself to such an extent that Karin is convinced that something is wrong and is constantly urging him to come over to the house to spend time with them. He politely declines, always with a lame excuse. One night he comes to them. He has a visitor, he explains, and he’d like to bring her over. Gus and Karin aren’t quite sure what to make of Bianca, a Real Girl sex doll that Lars has ordered over the internet – not for sex, but for companionship. Lars treats Bianca as if she’s a real person. The local psychiatrist (Patricia Clarkson) encourages Gus and Karin to go along with his delusion because it isn’t hurting anyone, and soon the rest of the town is going along with it as well, embracing Bianca as part of the community (at one point Lars is asked what his plans are for Friday and he says, “I have a school board meeting. Bianca got elected, so…”).

This is a plot that could go wrong in so many ways – it could be too twee, too broad, or turn crude – but it manages to hit all the right notes. Lars is never treated like the town freak – some citizens are hesitant, at first, to accept Bianca, but soon she’s a regular at church services and “volunteering” at the hospital while Lars is at work; and we slowly come to understand why he has created this delusion for himself. We also come to understand that what he’s doing isn’t objectively that weird. Yes, he is carrying on conversations with a doll, but look at two of his coworkers: one has a collection of action figures around his desk, another keeps small stuffed bears. A war of sorts breaks out between them as each messes with these things that are so precious to the other. Is Lars’ attachment to Bianca fundamentally that different from their relationships to their toys?

Another reason why the film works so well is that every actor is exactly right for his or her role, especially Gosling. We believe that he thinks Bianca is a real person, that they’re having a real relationship, but we don’t think that he’s crazy. We see his despair and his loneliness and we come to understand him, rather than judge him. There are not a lot of actors who could have played this role and found so fine a balance between comedy and tragedy. Schneider is good as the brother, worried about what the town will think and worried also that he’s to blame for Lars’ predicament. Mortimer and Clarkson are excellent in quiet, gentle roles, each trying to help the brothers come to terms with the still unresolved past.

There is sadness in this film, but there is also comedy and there is hope. You’ll leave the theater feeling good because you’ll know that Lars is going to be okay, because he lives in a place where people will help him make it so. This isn’t a film that toys with you or manipulates you with cheap sentiment. This is a film that approaches its material with such sincerity, such natural laughs and such natural heartbreak, that you simply let yourself be carried along with it.