Nightcrawler
Open Road Films (II) | Release Date: October 31, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
76
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
38
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzOct 31, 2014
This is a classic film, not just because every scene and line is casually beautiful and devoid of extraneous touches, but because its tone is mercilessly exact. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternOct 30, 2014
Mr. Gyllenhaal’s startling portrayal is far from the only distinction in this impeccably crafted feature film. Mr. Gilroy’s directorial debut connects its hero’s tacit madness to the larger craziness of a broadcast medium that teaches vast numbers of viewers to live with a false sense of insecurity. Read full review
100
EmpireDan JolinOct 27, 2014
Sharp, dark, satirical and bone-rattlingly thrilling, with a career-peak turn from Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s this year’s "Drive." Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 14, 2014
Gilroy, vastly supported by cinematographer and Los Angeles specialist Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), directs with the verve of a seasoned pro, even though Nightcrawler is his debut. Read full review
100
HitfixDrew McWeenySep 14, 2014
The film plays with tension beautifully, and there are a few set pieces that I think are all-timers. Read full review
95
Film.comJordan HoffmanSep 9, 2014
A fantastic, sleek and fun satire. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianJeff BakerOct 30, 2014
Gyllenhaal is in almost every frame of writer-director Dan Gilroy's first feature, skinny and wide-eyed, running down a driveway with his camera or cutting across oncoming traffic in the Challenger. It's an intense performance, the flip side of Ryan Gosling's in "Drive," playing the angles and filling space with empty words instead of soulful silences. Read full review
91
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezSep 14, 2014
There’s tremendous social and moral texture throughout the drama, but the socio-economic commentary of the movie is fabric, not heavy handed accessory. And the provocative ethical breaches—savage and scathing in the latter half—give the movie its delectable and wicked bite. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranOct 30, 2014
Nightcrawler is pulp with a purpose. A smart, engaged film powered by an altogether remarkable performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, it is melodrama grounded in a disturbing reality, an extreme scenario that is troubling because it cuts close to the bone. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirOct 30, 2014
Nightcrawler executes its ideas with tremendous craft and cool, and the courageous and counterintuitive pairing of its leads — Russo is 60, and Gyllenhaal 33 – produces two electrical, interlocking performances and undeniable erotic chemistry. Read full review
90
TimeRichard CorlissOct 30, 2014
If you see him (Jake Gyllenhaal)onscreen in Nightcrawler, you’ll have a closeup view of one of the movie year’s most compelling sociopaths. He’s something you can’t turn away from. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleWilliam GossOct 29, 2014
Releasing Nightcrawler on Halloween may seem counterintuitive, but then again, when better to release a thoroughly gripping portrait of an utterly modern sociopath? Read full review
88
New York PostLou LumenickOct 31, 2014
In his own twisted way, Lou is just as much a bloodsucker as Dracula, in a horror story that this tabloid veteran can attest is not as far removed from reality as you might assume. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversOct 30, 2014
Nightcrawler curves and hisses its way into your head with demonic skill. When the laughs come, they stick in your throat. This is a deliciously twisted piece of work. And Gyllenhaal, coiled and ready to spring, is scarily brilliant. He truly is a monster for our time. Read full review
88
USA TodayClaudia PuigOct 30, 2014
Thirty pounds lighter, all cheekbones and bulging eyes, Gyllenhaal plays one of the year's most memorable characters in this dark, provocative drama. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsOct 30, 2014
Gilroy vividly evokes both the LA exteriors and newsroom interiors, and the action sequences are fraught with tension. Read full review
85
TheWrapInkoo KangOct 30, 2014
The dramatic weight loss Gyllenhaal endured for the role, which transforms his dreamboat looks into a bat-like mask, is startling. But the actor's performance is just as impressive, nimbly selling Gilroy's occasionally overwritten lines while Louis’ punishing optimism finds new gradations of sadism and rage. Nightcrawler is the arrival of a thrilling character actor. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyOct 31, 2014
In its wickedly twisted way, Nightcrawler keeps "Network's" battle cry alive. It's a 21st-century takedown of the media's pandering ''if it bleeds, it leads'' ethos and the ghoulish nightcrawlers who live by it. Read full review
83
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallOct 30, 2014
The movie has a caffeinated spirit worthy of its graveyard shift milieu, a darkness artfully breached by cinematographer Robert Elswit, who previously framed L.A.'s unstill life in Magnolia and Boogie Nights. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzOct 30, 2014
A thick film of sleaze coats every frame of Nightcrawler, a movie that takes a hard look at media culture and provides Jake Gyllenhaal a terrific opportunity to creep us all out. Read full review
80
Village VoiceStephanie ZacharekOct 28, 2014
On the strength of Gyllenhaal's performance, Nightcrawler works best as a character study. It's chilling, but also wickedly funny and strange, like a good, dark Brian De Palma joke — in short, it's everything the stolid and humorless Gone Girl should have been. Read full review
80
Total FilmJamie GrahamOct 27, 2014
Gyllenhaal is sensational headlining a pitch-black satire with its finger on the pulse. Read full review
80
The GuardianHenry BarnesSep 14, 2014
From a subdued start Nightcrawler unfurls into a ghoulish and wickedly funny satire on journalism, the job market and self-help culture. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam LaceyOct 31, 2014
The trouble is that absolutely nothing about the movie feels like news. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerTirdad DerakhshaniOct 31, 2014
Yet, despite a mesmerizing performance by Gyllenhaal - he's as transfixing as a cobra in a snake charmer's dance - and a terrific turn by Riz Ahmed as an unskilled homeless kid Louis hires as his assistant, Nightcrawler doesn't quite have the satirical smarts that made "Network" a classic. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliOct 31, 2014
The most notable element of screenwriter Dan Gilroy's debut feature is the performance he elicits from Jake Gyllenhaal. In the tradition of Brando, Bale, Theron, and others, Gyllenhaal undergoes a radical physical transformation to play the part of Louis Bloom. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrOct 31, 2014
Nightcrawler is about TV news-video parasites, but the freakiest thing in it — the biggest bedbug of all — is Jake Gyllenhaal as the movie’s hero, Lou Bloom. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayOct 30, 2014
The film has a sulfuric, Dostoyevskian quality — and sick sense of humor — that captures the muted aquarium that Los Angeles becomes at night, a spell that’s broken once plot overtakes mood. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleOct 30, 2014
There are moments that are too macabre and outlandish, but Gilroy steers the movie just this side of farce, just this side of Chayefsky, and keeps it all within a realistic framework. At times watching, you might wonder how he’ll keep the story going, how he’ll top himself. But he does. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsOct 30, 2014
Despite the familiarity of its themes — the bottom-feeding news media; the pathology born of extreme isolation and a little too much online time; the American can-do spirit, perverted into something poisonous — Gilroy's clever, skeezy little noir is worth a prowl. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloOct 29, 2014
Nightcrawler is a portrait of an amoral opportunist who stumbles upon his horrible calling, and the film’s chief pleasure is watching Gyllenhaal portray what it might be like if Rushmore’s Max Fischer grew up to become Chuck Tatum, the unscrupulous reporter played by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s scabrous Ace In The Hole. It’s adolescent solipsism gone grotesquely rancid. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedOct 29, 2014
It keeps you creeped out and fascinated. Read full review
75
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreOct 29, 2014
Rene Russo is spot-on as Nina, an aging TV news director who is the only person Bloom will sell his footage to. Read full review
70
The DissolveScott TobiasOct 30, 2014
There’s a scolding tone to Nightcrawler that runs counter to its pulp energy, as if Gilroy is telling the audience to be alarmed by the things that turn them on. But much as Gilroy tries to be his own killjoy, Gyllenhaal’s wickedness prevails. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneOct 27, 2014
Nightcrawler has patches of clunkiness, to be sure, and Lou’s face-off at a police station, near the end, feels graceless and unnecessary. Yet the movie is quite something, and, despite its title, it doesn’t really crawl. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerSep 14, 2014
Like his erratic protagonist, Gilroy doesn’t always know when to settle down or call it quits, and the film’s constant shifts of tone can grow tiring, even if the action as a whole never gets boring. Read full review
63
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperOct 30, 2014
It’s a brilliant performance by Gyllenhaal in a film that veers from dark satire to tense crime thriller before the tires come off near the end, leaving the entire vehicle just short of worth recommending. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineChris CabinOct 28, 2014
Dan Gilroy's directorial debut only offers a familiar vision of today's newsman and producers as misery peddlers, and callow ratings slaves bordering on the monstrous. Read full review
60
The New York TimesA.O. ScottOct 30, 2014
Nightcrawler is a slick and shallow movie desperate, like Lou himself, to be something more. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanOct 30, 2014
It’s a pleasure to see Russo back on screen (she’s married to Gilroy). But Nina’s eager complicity is far too easy and every social critique flashes as bright as the neon guiding Lou around back-alley L.A. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeySep 14, 2014
The film’s a satirical thriller, which is a novel enough entity in itself these days; it has a pungent, can’t-miss-the-point premise, and a big, weird, sharkish performance from Jake Gyllenhaal powering it up. It’s a must-see and a must-talk-about film, electrically overblown in the moment, if not wholly in control of its pay-off. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerOct 31, 2014
By turning the loner Louis into a nutcase – if he blinked at all during the movie, I missed it – the movie becomes a species of horror film. Read full review
50
VarietyScott FoundasSep 14, 2014
Touches of apocalyptic comedy run throughout Nightcrawler, but the movie’s overriding tone is one of strident, finger-wagging self-seriousness. Read full review
40
SlateDana StevensOct 31, 2014
Nightcrawler, like its entrepreneurial-to-a-fault protagonist, is ambitious but ultimately hollow, eager to dazzle and shock us but reluctant to let us inside. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinOct 31, 2014
After a few minutes you know everything about Louis you’re going to know; the only surprise in Nightcrawler is the level of grotesqueness it achieves. There’s more insight (and entertainment) in an average sketch from the old SCTV series; I kept imagining Joe Flaherty’s horror host Count Floyd climbing out of his coffin and chanting, “Oooh, that Louis, he’s veh-ry skerrrr-y, kiddies — ahwoooooooo!” Read full review
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