This is not really about Ryan Gosling's face or Casey Affleck's teeth. It's not about Scarlett Johansson either but, as in a film featuring an ensemble cast of stars, they will all have parts to play.

It's actually about style, used adjectivally as in "stylish thriller". The latest features of a genre that's been around for a while, in a range of international guises, came into sharp definition with the release of Drive in 2011. Obviously, the neon-noir cinematography was as gorgeous as its star, Ryan Gosling. And so, by implication, was the violence he dished out in increasingly lavish helpings as the plot accelerated towards an inevitably bloody conclusion. Same with The Place Beyond the Pines, which offered a similarly delectable experience except this time the mode of transport was motorbike rather than motorcar – and Gosling had gone blond. Not just a pretty face (we'll come back to this), he is, of course, a serious actor with the knack of conveying inner life with minimum effort.

The problem with Drive was that any kind of psychology went out the window once the graphic requirements of violence took hold. (The same happens after the opening scenario – the delivery of a pizza, say – in pornography.) Remember when he was making out with Carey Mulligan in an elevator before beating up a guy and stamping on his head? She seemed unfazed by the revelation of this less than charming side of her boyfriend's character. But what would it be like if you found yourself falling for someone who behaved like that? It would be like dating Ray Winstone in Nil by Mouth: a sure sign that a fist was coming soon to a face near yours.

A few years ago, I was with a friend in downtown San Francisco. We stepped inside a bar as a group of rough-looking youths came towards us. The bar was noisy with pumping hip-hop. Heading to a table we looked through the plate-glass windows and saw the leader of this group engaged in a furious fight. His opponent fell to the floor and was soon getting kicked in the head. The window was like a movie screen, the music deafening. It was, as people say of intense experiences, like watching a film – except in one detail: it was completely horrible. Of course it was; violence, outside of a boxing ring, is always ugly. The one thing it is not is stylish.

Even more appalling than fights is their aftermath, when the damage is done, when ambulances take the injured to hospital. Not so in movies, where people recover quickly from the most terrible thumpings. In Out of the Furnace, Affleck is twice beaten to a pulp in bare-knuckle bouts (the first time he bounces back and beats the guy who is beating him to a pulp into even more of a pulp) but on both occasions his teeth remain in perfect shape. While much effort is devoted to making sure that every detail in a movie is realistic, impeccable dental work might well be Hollywood's most implacable convention. Audiences eat up beatings and murders but will not stomach bad teeth.

In real life, teeth are the second things to go, in fights, after the nose. You can always recognise tough people because of their missing teeth and busted noses. They look awful – they look like people who've been in fights. (As someone at ringside says of Tony Janiro after he's been pummelled by Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull: "He ain't pretty no more.") They don't look like pretty boy Gosling because at some point, however quick they are to stomp people in an elevator, they will have met someone who's stomped them first – and that someone might well turn out to have been their dad.

Perfect movie teeth are metonyms – dentonyms? – of a larger dishonesty: the purely cosmetic nature of what passes as brutal and gritty realism. Cuts heal overnight and no permanent damage is done unless, by permanent damage, we mean death. Either you recover quickly or you die of it, even more promptly. You shoot through a door and kill someone. What you don't get is the awful effect of that shooting, how the death occurs. In real life, the consequences are, as Oscar Pistorius discovered, sick-making. We might even term this the Pistorius lesson: if you shoot your girlfriend in the head don't be upset if this has a catastrophic effect on her face. It's a lesson that should be learned by film-makers: show violence if you have to – but be honest about its effects.

The difference between these recent films and the man who might be regarded as their legitimating godfather is that Tarantino made gory comedies about filmic violence. Reservoir Dogs was blood and wit-splattered; films such as Blue Ruin or Killing Them Softly are as earnest and solemn – and take themselves as seriously – as The Sorrow and the Pity. That, as Othello says when contemplating strangling his wife, is the pity of it. These are not action films – they are character studies, art films. They're beautifully shot – as though the people making them have only ever seen the world reflected in the sleek surfaces of a vehicle driven by Ryan Gosling – or Scarlett Johansson.

Which brings us to the most stunningly photographed film of recent years: Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (out now on DVD). I saw it a while back in San Francisco, with the same friend who'd witnessed the fight there a few years previously. The scenes where Johansson wanders the city streets of Scotland make the viewer feel like an alien from space (though whether this constitutes a Yes or No vote for independence is never clear). The long sequence of a seaside drowning is desperate and moving – then Johansson clubs someone to death with a rock! Ask why and – as happens if you wonder why a housewife is dressed only in stockings and suspenders when she knows a pizza is about to be delivered – an exquisitely lit red herring swims into shot. The film declares its cinematic authority and then, with no diminution of visual energy, becomes spectacularly boring.

Style, for film-makers such as Antonioni, Malick or Tarkovsky (with whom Glazer was rashly compared), is the visual expression of a philosophy. What is the philosophy of Under the Skin? That there is nothing under the skin, the surface. That's why it is exemplary, dazzling and does such violence to deeper hopes of what cinema might aspire to – even while appearing to realise them. Stylish, in this context, no longer describes or qualifies something in the way adjectives normally do. Like "musical", it's become a genre – a stylish – in its own right.