La La Land (2016)

I was interested in seeing this film because not only am I a sucker for a good musical, but I'll admit to being a big fan of Ryan Gosling as well as Emma Stone and I was intrigued to see what the director of Whiplash would do with a musical picture to make it fresh and unique. The premise of the story is that Stone is a young actress who has moved to LA to wait tables while auditioning to try and 'make it', while Gosling is a jazz purist  who plays the piano in bars to make a living and dreams of opening his own Jazz bar. Or to put it succinctly - "Two young artists meet and fall in love while chasing their dreams". The musical flows thematically from first love to heartbreak and every other emotion between, with great music throughout.

Lost River (2015)

Lost River marks the directorial and writing debut of Ryan Gosling and stars Christina Hendricks, Iain De Caestecker, Matt Smith and Ben Mendelsohn. This is one of the weirdest film I've ever experienced in my life. It's introduced as a Fantasy but some aspect of this film such as the setting: this fictional Detroit feels so real. This movie doesn't make any sens; for the most part it is not cohesive, the narrative structure is flawed and broken but the images, the cinematography and the score are all great and thoughts provoking.

Ryan Gosling directing in the movie was meh, and the whole time I noticed he worked on the visuals and the look of the movie which by the looks great but still I felt the focus was only on that and not the whole film, I might be wrong or not. Being an actor that many people like the easiest thing for Gosling would've been to direct a mainstream film, but I give him credit for trying to make an artistic film that will be appreciated by a select group of people.