Ryan Gosling

With the actors that we follow for a lifetime, there is always that one movie that you go back to, the one that represented the moment of discovery, when you knew as you left the theater, you wanted to know what they would do next. For me, with Ryan Gosling, it was "Half Nelson" in 2006, his inner-city junior high teacher idealism clashing with his drug addiction in ways that were both incredibly complex and intimate. With Jessica Chastain, it was more recent, "The Tree of Life" last spring.

"Drive" is a Los Angeles neo-noir, a neon-lit crime story made with lots of visual style. It's a film in love with both traditional noir mythology and ultra-modern violence, a combination that is not ideal. Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director award at Cannes, and it's easy to see why this tale of an emotionless wheelman (Ryan Gosling) who lives to drive and makes a rare stab at human connection with a fetching neighbor took the prize. Impeccably shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, "Drive" always looks dressed to kill.

the kind of unfocused kids who make parents weep. "I was bad at everything. I used to sit in the back of the class my whole school career. My father said to my mother, 'There's something radically wrong with this boy.' He despaired of me," says Sir Anthony Hopkins with a chuckle. "I was always picking fights. Because I thought that was what the girls would like," says Ryan Gosling. "I'd pick on the toughest guys because the girls liked them. So if I beat them up the girls would like me.

In Warner Bros.' upcoming action drama "The Gangster Squad," based on a series of Los Angeles Times articles, Josh Brolin plays John O'Mara, a Los Angeles police officer in an elite unit devoted to cleaning up the city's criminal element, specifically targeting a mobster operation run by Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) — the movie's ensemble cast also features Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Giovanni Ribisi and Anthony Mackie, among others. Brolin learned a lot about the film's 1940s setting from his father, actor James Brolin, and from stories he read about the real-life officers of the era. "These guys were pretty brutal back then," he said recently, sitting outside City Hall, where he was shooting scenes for the Warner Bros.

Ryan Gosling looked pretty ordinary as he tried to pick between this table and that table and then order tea ... no ... coffee ... at the Standard on a recent afternoon. The 23-year-old actor, who stars in the just-opened film "The United States of Leland," also wasn't behaving much like a celebrity 30 minutes earlier, as he traded goofy faces with an apparently homeless man lounging on a bench across from him while Gosling posed during a Sunday photo shoot.

An odd reverence comes over Ryan Gosling as he describes the weeks he spent on the outskirts of wintry Toronto in an unheated garage apartment with Bianca, an eerily lifelike silicone sex doll who costars with him in his new film, "Lars and the Real Girl." As he speaks, his deep-set eyes wander out the window, lost in memories of their emotional scenes and the "calming presence" the petite, heavy-lidded brunet brought to the set.

Violence is the trigger in "The Place Beyond the Pines," Derek Cianfrance's latest love letter to bad breaks. But it's the ripple effect of responsibility, regret, limited resources and guilt that makes "Pines" particularly relevant in a time when so many struggle from paycheck to paycheck. Starring Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, Bradley Cooper, Ray Liotta and Dane DeHaan, the movie is intimate in its telling, sweeping in its issues and stumbles only occasionally. The idiosyncratic Cianfrance tends to gravitate toward the economically challenged who live lives of desperation.

EXCLUSIVE: Another horse looks to be joining the 2013-14 Oscar race. "The Dallas Buyers Club," the long-gestating AIDS drama starring Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, is close to a distribution deal with Focus Features, according to two people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to talk about them publicly. The Universal Pictures specialty division is negotiating to pick up domestic and select international rights to the movie and would release it in the U.S. before the end of the year, the people said, positioning it and its actors for award consideration.

THERE'S no membership card, but there is a statue. There's no clubhouse, but there is an annual meeting at the Kodak Theatre. Welcome to the Oscar Club. It's no secret that Oscar voters seem to favor certain performers over others, nominating people such as Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jack Nicholson time and again. But all that may be changing given the broadband speed with which Oscar odds now rise and fall.