Peter Suderman Reviews Nightcrawler

Here’s
the opening bit of my review of Nightcrawler from today’s
Washington Times: 

In “Nightcrawler,” Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom,
an aimless Los Angeles misanthrope who finds the perfect gig:
freelance TV news photographer on the vampire shift, capturing the
nocturnal horrors that lead the morning.

Mr. Gyllenhaal looks more than a little like a vampire
himself, with his bugged-out eyes, his slicked-back midnight hair,
and his sharply angled facial features, as if too-little skin has
been stretched around too much skull.

He rarely blinks, and when he smiles, or scowls, or expresses
anything with his face at all, it has the feel of a too-well
practiced maneuver, a simulacra of emotion rather than the real
thing.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s Bloom is the heart and soul of “Nightcrawler,”
which is to say that it hasn’t got one. Instead, it is
fascinatingly empty — a dark, shocking, bitingly funny profile of a
person who is not really a person.

Bloom is an anti-hero in the tradition of both Patrick Bateman
in “American Pyscho” and Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” a movie
that “Nightcrawler” coyly references in its opening moments.

But writer-director Dan Gilroy gives Bloom’s
alienation a distinctly modern twist: Instead of learning by
watching and imitating, he studies by using the Internet.

Read the complete review.

Check out Kurt Loder’s review for Reason here.