Best LA Film Noir To Date?

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2019)

When few people we're talking about Nightcrawler, a film that was somewhat initially buried by its release date, I was lamenting that this masterpiece (one of the few American films that have banged my bells in the past decade) barely took home any hardware, while overpriced, badly acted and directed mediocrities were being regularly feted. Well, since the advent of 'fake news' as political jargon that's all changed as the streamers and the dvd crowd has caught up with a film not as shocking to me in its content, but in its level of excellence in almost every category of film making.
Needless to say, Gyllenhaal's noted performance represents the ne plus ultra portrait of the conflicted antagonist as protagonist, no easy feat. The guy is simply one of the best players of his generation, and yet, still remains somehow a bit under the radar, perhaps because he is far more artist than celebrity, unlike others, too numerous to mention.
What does disturb me still however is what I consider to be a general misunderstanding, on the part of the United States of Amnesia's filmgoing public to what the film is really about. First, I do not see Nightcrawler as a psychological study. It is a crime film. But who's buying this stuff? The public.
What Nighcrawler is theme wise is an on point dissection of the horrors of unregulated capitalism and the misguided ethos of of the one-dimensional desperate quest for profit (subsistence in the environment of radically inflated cost of living) as they spill down to the millennial generation through the internet, which becomes almost a character in the narrative, at once Lou's mentor and his alter-ego - like Lear's Fool leading him onto increasingly further depths of depravity in the wasteland of the world of the L.A. night. After all, this is what it takes to establish a successful business, from scratch no less, is it not?
In what is in many opinions the state of the art in scripts, this message is entirely driven home by the subtext in a tale that becomes considerably more than the taut specimen of L.A. Film Noir it presents itself as. Both understated and over-the-top, Nightcrawler deals with some of our most firmly entrenched and divisive social problems at a time when the fabric of our society is severely threatened and does not flinch in its facility for speaking truth to power. A great film, when there are few worth watching.