We're hours away from Scary Movie Month and---while Nightcrawler doesn't exactly qualify as frightening---it IS intense. Jake Gyllenhaal is certainly at his Taxi Driver weirdest. He's also just about at his best in Dan Gilroy's investigation of capitalism-at-any-cost. Rough stuff, but it's also quite funny. Gyllenhaal plays an amoral "stringer" (a freelance videographer) who knows that ratings equals money and "if it bleeds, it leads". He'll do absolutely anything to get the shot...and then we discover the gory results. Rene Russo, Bill Paxton and Riz Ahmed are effective too, but this film belongs to the worm in the lead role. So doll up to look your best before you go on the air to glorify crime scenes and put a scare in your viewers as the 613rd episode of Have You Ever Seen gets deep into the scummy world of Nightcrawler.

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