Nightcrawler is a great movie.

If you haven't watched Nightcrawler, but have watched anything else from the last several years, you should be banned from cinemas because you have shit taste. Nightcrawler is a great movie about how utterly morally bankrupt the media is. It stars Jake Gyllenhaaal as creepy fuck Lou, a petty thief whose skill set translates perfectly to the job of filming crime scenes and related human misery for profit. His character is like the Gawker of movie characters, except much more likeable and less evil.

Lou takes inspiration from online business courses and enlists Rick, a halfwit who needs the money, to help him navigate around LA looking for scenes of violence and destruction. As the film rolls on, he pushes the limits further and further by moving around bits of stuff, including bodies, to get better footage, and ultimately semi-staging the news so he can record it. As someone that's done TV shit, I know people like that are out there. Given how brazenly "journalists" sneer at the very concept of ethics, it's not even surprising that people like this prosper in this industry.

Since everyone in the media is a lying, evil, amoral, deceitful scumbag, you would think the character would not be very likeable, and apparently this was true for many people when the movie came out. A lot of people's reactions to this film were basically "it's bad because he is a bad man", by which rationale Citizen Kane, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, A Clockwork Orange, and basically everything worth watching sucks. I can't relate to those people, and I suspect they're not really human.

Anyway, Jake Gyllenhaaaaaaaaaaaaal and Rene Russo are both really good in it and you should see it if you like movies with dysfunctional protagonists like Taxi Driver, King of Comedy, Super, and Paul Blart Mall Cop.