Dan Gilroy's debut at feature directing is a cinematic tour de force, and the against-type casting of Jake Gyllenhaal is inspired

Rating: 10/10 (1 July 2017)

Casting Jake Gyllenhall was the first of the masterful strokes by director Dan Gilroy in creating "Nightcrawler." Jake is usually just too darn likable, and thus might seem unsuitable for the evil lead in pic.
However, Jake rose to challenge by masterfully playing his character against-type, as a chillingly sociopathic, ruthlessly upwardly mobile wannabe video news stringer. (An appropriately applicable definition of Hollywood/L.A. is that it is "The place where you become what you pretend to be.")
Jake reportedly lost nearly thirty pounds to play the gaunt, soulless, Mephistophelean petty criminal, Louis Bloom, who accidentally stumbles on an exciting way to earn instant cash from TV stations: by videotaping on-scene police activity and bloody accidents. Jake figures out early on that he needs a police radio call "scanner" to find the action. He later barges into a local TV station during night hours, and discovers a ready TV market in Rene Russo, playing a desperate, over-the-hill, graveyard-shift news director looking for gory, ratings-pumping news stories.
Jake "hires" a naive rube for as assistant to cover the police calls and give him lightning driving directions t calls through the streets of L.A. The goal is to be first on the scene, get the video shot, then hotfoot the footage to the station for a hopefully exclusive airing on the news. Jake pays the assistant practically nothing, but salves him with ongoing promotional "titles," such as Vice-President (of apparently nothing, as far as a real company is concerned).
When the assistant wises up and demands a large share of the sale of a major news story, Jake schemes to eliminate his now-troublesome assistant by setting him up to become part of the news himself in an impromptu but lethal final assignment.
Director Dan Gilroy's earthly, noir-like photography of the L.A. streets is shot almost totally at night. Gilroy captures the ever-present juxtaposition of the saccharine West L.A. affluence and the searingly dangerous underbelly of the L.A./Hollywood scene.
Truly riveting, entertaining, and best of all, pic does not suffer from the typical "Hollywood Ending" that has ruined many films. Recommended.