14) Locke
If watching Tom Hardy sit behind the wheel of a car for 84 minutes sounds like your idea of fun, a head examination might be in order. But thanks both to the stunningly talented actor and writer-director Steven Knight, something as ostensibly mundane as a late-night drive emerges as one of the year’s most electric thrillers.
Playing Ivan Locke, a self-proclaimed “good man” who rushes to his pregnant mistress’s side as she gives birth on the eve of a massive concrete pour he’s been tasked with overseeing, Hardy is simply aces. Alternately charming and repulsive, admirable and despicable, seductive and monstrous, the actor is never less than wholly compelling. As the cracks in Ivan’s happy facade appear and then widen, Hardy does some of the finest, most furiously controlled acting of his career.
He finds a willing accomplice in Knight, who directs as if tightening a vice. Though his camera is trapped inside the car, Knight goes a step further, pushing viewers into Ivan’s strained, scattered mind. The result is a showcase for one of the year’s most masterful performances, a dazzling cinematic experiment and a riveting exploration of modern masculinity all wrapped up in one slick package.
13) Nightcrawler
It’s incredibly difficult to build an entire movie around a complete creep, but first-time director Dan Gilroy manages the task with aplomb in Nightcrawler, creating an absorbing and disturbing thriller that unsettles as much as it electrifies. Jake Gyllenhaal is scary-good (and just plain scary) as Lou Bloom, an opportunistic leech who finds his calling as an overnight TV newsman.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” he’s told by another journalist (Bill Paxton), and Lou takes to that dogma like a moth to flame. Stalking the city streets and always hunting for his next story, Lou is unnervingly devoted to his chosen profession. Gyllenhaal underwent an extreme physical transformation to play the role, and his sunken eyes are the most terrifying part of Nightcrawler. You understand why they’re sunken in too – because Lou, a vampire of the modern era, would never risk closing them and missing a single moment of marketable footage. He’s naked ambition personified.
Nightcrawler is built around his captivating performance, but Gyllenhaal is far from the film’s only strength. Rene Russo relishes the part of Nina, a producer at a local TV station who strives toward a certain image for her program: “A screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” In a sick and twisted way, she and Lou are made for each other, two ruthless entrepreneurs feeding off a culture that demands its daily blood and guts. Gilroy doesn’t shy away from how unholy their alliance truly is. He also doesn’t take any half-measures in terms of filming; Gilroy’s Los Angeles plays like a slick, modern blend of Drive and Mean Streets, marrying neo-noir visual stylings with an engaging restlessness. It’s a way we’ve never seen the oft-filmed city before.
The script is also a biting satire of our sensationalist news culture. Lou is a vulture, to be sure, but he’s also a savvy businessman, always looking for the next rung up and searching for ways to improve his bargaining positions. That the guy is so successful just speaks to Nightcrawler‘s pessimism about the way things are now, and the way they are going. Soon, the film implies, there will come a time when nothing is safe from Lou’s invading lens, when privacy will shrivel and die under the beam of his ever-present flashlight. Nightcrawler is one of the year’s scariest thrillers, wired into the modern state of the media and intelligent enough to craft a tall tale that appears more plausible with every passing day.