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"Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn left the Cannes Film Festival in a blaze of glory in 2011 after the premiere of Drive. That film became an instant cult classic, and Gosling and Refn&amp;#039;s latest collaboration Only God Forgives - a violent thriller set in the Bangkok underworld - premiered in competition at Cannes today (May 22). Digital Spy rounds up the first reviews - from the five-star to the one-star - for the eagerly-awaited Drive reunion below:  The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) &amp;quot;Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn&amp;#039;s bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance. I&amp;#039;m afraid it&amp;#039;s going to be even nastier the next time I watch it.&amp;quot; Total Film (Jamie Graham) &amp;quot;Only God Forgives is a failure but a rather magnificent failure, made on Refn&amp;#039;s own terms. It is a beautiful, hollow film, with the director&amp;#039;s insistence that Julian is fighting God \u2013 and that the film is about existential crisis \u2013 needing to be taken at its word. For most, it simply comes down to this: it&amp;#039;s no Drive.&amp;quot; Empire (Damon Wise) &amp;quot;A hellish, dreamlike vision of purgatory that works better as an immersive experience than a narrative. All performances are minimal and stylised, with a heavy use of red that excludes almost every other colour in the spectrum.&amp;quot;  Evening Standard (Derek Malcolm) &amp;quot;A very strange movie indeed, equipped with a script that would hardly fill four or five pages, and characters who move slowly back and forth when they are not staring at each other.&amp;quot; Hollywood Elsewhere (Jeffrey Wells) &amp;quot;Movies really don&amp;#039;t get much worse than Nicholas Winding Refn&amp;#039;s Only God Forgives. It&amp;#039;s a s**t macho fantasy - hyperviolent, ethically repulsive, sad, nonsensical, deathly dull, snail-paced, idiotic, possibly woman-hating, visually suffocating, pretentious. I realize I sound like Rex Reed on one of his rants, but trust me, please - this is a defecation by an over-praised, over-indulged director who thinks anything he craps out is worthy of your time. I felt violated, s**t upon, sedated, narcotized, appalled and bored stiff.&amp;quot; The Playlist (Jessica Kiang) &amp;quot;Gosling feels oddly recessive here, as a more passive participant than we&amp;#039;re used to him being, but he should be congratulated for committing to the role of the near-mute Julian as he slowly, and ultimately gorily, overcomes his mommy issues.&amp;quot; Time Out (Dave Calhoun) &amp;quot;Very little happens beyond these explosions of violence, which leaves us to wade through a great deal of slo-mo and characters forever staring into the middle distance. We learn barely anything about them, and it&amp;#039;s Gosling who comes out the worst. He floats moodily through the film... Style over substance doesn&amp;#039;t really tell the half of it: you can bathe a corpse in groovy light and dress it in an expensive suit, but in the end that rotting smell just won&amp;#039;t go away.&amp;quot; Screen Daily (Mark Adams) &amp;quot;For many, it will be hard to look beyond the explicit violence and rather thinly drawn plot and characters, but there is much to enjoy and appreciate in the sheer cinematic verve, intelligence and elegance that makes Only God Forgives an immersive and brutally intriguing film.&amp;quot; Photo gallery - Cannes Film Festival 2013 in pictures:  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/cannes-film-festival/news/a483558/only-god-forgives-reviews-critics-split-on-hyperviolent-ryan-gosling-film/>