Nightcrawler (2014)

While inside the house, Bloom gets several angles of each butchered body; earlier, he even drags a body at a car wreck to get a better image. There’s a mild but irrefutably present bit of self-excoriation for Gilroy in these scenes, as the filmmaker depends on presenting murder and violence in very precise ways for his audience. Sadly, he doesn’t develop this deeply alluring aspect of his narrative. Instead, he takes the moral high ground via Ahmed’s conflicted character, and in a final twist, provides a shallowly cynical condemnation of the press that reveals a pointed preference for banal pessimism over further exploration of how his own profession [ie. cinema] thrives off of illicit, even sexy images of murder, pain, and blood.

— Chris Cabin (Slant Magazine)

Local news, embodied in a desperate, cynical producer played by Rene Russo, may be a snake pit of tawdry, ratings-driven exploitation, but in the age of TMZ, in which everyone with a smartphone is a potential video journalist, there is something quaint about the film’s hyperventilating sense of scandal.

— A. O. Scott (New York Times)

Are local TV news stations really conducting daily bidding wars over the goriest footage random freelancers can bring them at the last moment? Even allowing that some version of this transaction has happened in the history of TV journalism, would it be the likely path a creepy amateur videographer would choose in the age of the Internet? Couldn’t he eliminate the middleman and start his own creepy amateur website? Really, though, questions of logic and verisimilitude seem out of place with respect to Nightcrawler, which aspires neither to be a naturalistic character portrait nor a Network-style media satire.

— Dana Stevens (Slate)