Comment on 'Nightcrawler’ review: a good creepy Gyllenhaal

[...] when satire meets reality, there’s no need to exaggerate, and so we get this story of a creepy guy who spends his nights filming scenes of human calamity and selling them to TV news. The movie star alchemy — that special combination of exactly the right weight and exactly the right haircut to produce exactly the right effect — has been thrown out of balance. Driving on the freeway one night, he stumbles onto an accident scene and watches as a freelance camera crew records the drama — cops pulling a woman from a burning car. No, there are actual people out there looking for this stuff, listening to their police radios and rushing to every scene that just might have enough blood to make the news. When he blunders into a crime scene ahead of the police, we hope he’ll make it out before they arrive and that no one will confiscate his camera. Gilroy also shows us the allure of a TV news station, the adrenaline, the allure of artifice, the jacked-up personalities, the excitement of knowing that something is going out live at that precise moment. 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.