dvd of the week Lewis Bloom, played by a balls-out brilliant Jake Gyllenhaal, is a nightcrawler, a freelance reporter who spends the nights wandering the city, waiting for a police scanner to announce a car crash or a murder that can be filmed and turned into the bloody local TV news. Pathologically ambitious, solicitous and…
Sites like Gawker, papers like the National Enquirer and stations like HLN give it some serious competition, but local television news is still arguably the crassest, most cynical and often least ethical news medium in the United States. This has been the case for decades, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has become a cliché…
dvd of the week In Prisoners, the Quebecois auteur Denis Villeneuve directed Jake Gyllenhaal to one of his best performances, as a cold and determined cop searching for two kidnapped girls. Enemy, based on Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s book The Double, is as austere and difficult as Prisoners was pulpy and obvious. Gyllenhaal plays…
Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano in Prisoners dvd of the week The daughters of both Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are kidnapped, and when Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) doesn’t work fast enough, Keller takes the law into his own hands. This is mostly at the expense of the mildly retarded Alex…
Prisoners About half way through Denis Villeneuve’s haunting, absorbing and morally problematic Prisoners, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are screaming at each other. Keller is insisting that he knows that Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is the man who has kidnapped and hidden his and Franklin’s young daughters; Franklin, in tears, keeps…
