Excellent piece of acting, but pretty standard stuff

Rating: 6/10 (12 July 2018)

There's not much to say about the story of Nightcrawler. If it rises to the category of satire, as many of the reviewers here think, it's hardly original in attacking TV news for featuring crime and blood as a way to boost their ratings. That's been done a hundred times, and often much better than this. Most of the action consists of a guy rushing up to a n accident or crime scene and pushing his way into the chaos to get video footage. Not much of that sticks in your memory.
The movie's one saving grace is the driven, manipulative insanity of the main character. Gyllenhaal has a gleam in his eye that, even in the quietest moments, makes it clear that this guy, for all his attempts to charm people, is crazy and dangerous.
There are plenty of time-wasters worse than this.
The writers deserve special credit for one scene. The main character's attempt over dinner in a Mexican restaurant to seduce the woman who's in charge of buying his videos is so wacky, so remote from any normal relationship, that it's humorous at the same time that it's appalling. There the dialogue carries the scene on its own, and Gyllenhaal doesn't have much to do beyond speaking the lines.