The Ten Best Films of 2014: #6

#6


"Nightcrawler" is writer-director Dan Gilroy's deliciously over-the-top portrait of Lou Bloom, a being of unknown origin who channels his entrepreneurship into freelance videography and ends up cornering the L.A. morning-news market with his gruesome crime footage. Jake Gyllenhaal is scarily good as the hollow-eyed and affectless Bloom, and Rene Russo better than ever as the desperate producer upon whom Lou's lurid video works an aphrodisiacal effect. Gilroy opens "Nightcrawler" with a beautifully mounted assemblage of shots of the city at night and, by the end, it's taken its place alongside "Drive" in the pantheon of neoclassic L.A. films.