Ryan Gosling has got to be one of my favorite leading men in Hollywood. He’s got the looks to be a legendary hearthrob, the acting skills to win Oscars and the artistic credibility to be beloved by audiences of all ages. Despite all of those things, he’s mainly restricted himself to cinema that’s experimental and unorthodox, like “Drive” or “Blue Valentine”. Sure, the occasional “Crazy, Stupid, Love” and “The Gangster Squad” show up on his resume, but he’s mainly featured in artistic fare like “The Place Beyond The Pines”, his most recent film venture and, in my opinion, one of his best movies ever.

Luke (Ryan Gosling) is a ne’er-do-well fellow, who learns an old flame of his, Romina (Eva Mendes), is raising his son. Feeling responsible to be able to provide for his son, as a counterexample to his dad’s poor parenting, he takes up bank robbing as a way to secure funding for his new family. This “idyllic” life soon involves Avery (Bradley Cooper), a cop whose interactions with Luke lead him to a life he couldn’t possibly have comprehended.

As I said above, Ryan Gosling is stupendous in this performance and especially excelling in emotionally driven scenes. Bradley Cooper continues to showcase his astounding acting abilities, in the role of tormented cop Avery. His character arc may be the most interesting in the film, having a balancing act of being likable and yet at some moments surprisingly deplorable and all the while captivating the audience. He pulls it off ten-fold.

On a side note, Ben Mendelsohn plays my favorite character in the film, the fascinatingly shady Robin, though thanks to his brief appearance in “The Dark Knight Rises”, I at first kept wondering when Bane would walk on-screen and cause his usual mischief.

The action sequences are staged interestingly; there’s not a lot of them, and none have the scale of, say, a “Transformers” flick, but they’re still stunning to watch and well crafted, especially one that seems to mainly take place in the span of a single shot that shows the cops chasing Luke. There will doubtlessly be better action sequences from some of this summer’s big action flicks, but I’ll be befuddled if this scene doesn’t remain one of the ten best action scenes of 2013 cinema.

Normally, such attributes would have me labeling it as a masterpiece, or some other hyperbole, but a few flaws keep it from attaining such status immediately, though repeat viewings may change my opinion. My main complaint is the film feels too long, especially in it’s third act, where there’s this one moment where I really wanted the film to end due to the emotional callback it provides halfway through it’s running time, but alas, it continues on. Thankfully, the final fifteen minutes are superb, but some scenes in this third act feel repetitive and a bit out of place regardless.

“The Place Beyond The Pines” is a very different kind of film, but it’s also an extremely well made film, full of excellent writing and performances that match the superb writing. It may be a bit slow towards the end, but the film as a whole is a riveting drama with an emotional impact that is impossible to forget about.