The Nightcrawler – Review by Wenchao

Review of Nightcrawler

Chen Wenchao

  Just as we can see from the title of the film, the protagonist Lou is an antihero who is immersed in the dark night and tries to record every dark side of the society in order to get success in his own career.

At the beginning of the film, he is just a thief who makes a living by stealing some copper wire at night. In other words, he is a nobody who acts on his own, has no job, no family or friends. But even at that situation, he is still conceited. When he failed to sell the things he stole to the manager at a price he wanted, he even claimed that their “business relationship” need to be changed and that is the last offer he can accept.

Actually, It’s not difficult to find his positive character: he is a brainy quick-learner and has persuasive style of conversation.

The Lobster— Review by Liliean

Review of Lobster

Lilean Buhl

All dystopias take elements of contemporary life and create a world which is constructed with an emphasis on these elements, highlighting their status, their ambivalence in our reality through absurd exaggeration of their meaningfulness. In the bleak world of The Lobster, it is dating, love, and the pursuit of togetherness that gets the treatment. The colors are earthy, the music, if there at all, remains eerie, and the voices defeated --- in The Lobster, what is said (usually ultra-literal commentary) and how it is said (in tone so robotic and vocabulary as detached from human communication as we know possible, such as on the other end of customer-service hotlines or in language-learning videos) is coherently aiming at absurdism through literalness. The actors almost play humans, but not quite. The plot almost makes sense, but not quite. The Lobster is programmatic in its constant, multi-levelled satirizing of love and relationships --- its commentary is so direct, in fact, that it arrives at an accomplished satire in the first five minutes. What follows, however, takes a hundred minutes to tell you the same joke, with the same straight face, a hundred times over. If you loved the joke in the first place, you might make it.

The Nightcrawler— Review by Liliean

  Review of Nightcrawler

Lilean Buhl

That a film can age well, like a good wine or cheese, is well documented. But does that only hold true after a movie’s premiere? Nightcrawler, an eerie, funny, crass, genre-busting thriller, comedy, social reality film, and psychological study, lay in director and writer Dan Gilroy’s desk for almost three decades. It is a film primarily about a sociopathic, mysterious genius/whacko (Jake Gyllenhaal) who gets into the stringing game with cold zeal, treading on everybody in his way and sacrificing close relationships (he has no friends) for his obsession of selling ever more drastic material of the night before’s murders, crashes, and catastrophes to voyeuristic news stations. The movie is also an oversubscription of US news channels, where gore and private suffering are the hottest commodities – an exaggeration because the action, like Gyllenhaal’s character, zooms in at the most precarious crime scenes in a toxic environment it, generally, portrays accurately. But it is Nightcrawler’s feel that makes it a film worth watching, a feel for atmosphere and setting (and, to a lesser extent, its actors’ performances) that might well have profited from ripening in its author’s mind for 29 years.

The Nightcrawler – Review by Swea

Nightcrawler Review

Dan Gilroy’s 2014 movie Nightcrawler follows Lou Bloom through the night-clad streets of Los Angeles as he makes his way into the ethical edges of the stringer business. Lou stumbles into this career verging between freelance journalism and bystander by coincidence. As he watches ambulances and police taking care of a car accident, a guy with a camera runs past him to film not only the crash site but the victims as well. This quick explanation is enough to hook Lou: He provides film material for the highest bidding news station. Lou jumps right into the business with a cheap camera and an intern hired with little white lies. His talent for stretching the truth does not only lead him straight to success, together with his sort of detached ruthlessness it gets him into more than questionable moral territory.

The Lobster – Review by Annika

Review: “The Lobster” (2015)

by Annika Schönwitz

“The Lobster” is one of those films whose premises sound so incredibly absurd that you can’t help but approach them with a good chunk of skepticism. A closer look, however, pays off:

Imagine a society yielded to an unemotional dystopia in which living without a partner is considered a crime. Singles that are exposed are given 45 days under supervision to find a mate, otherwise they will be transformed into an animal of their choice.

The Lobster – Review by Anna

The Lobster, with its dystopian ideals of love, captures a bleak and dark world. Ironically, this world is devoid of any actual love. Visually bleak, as well as emotionally, The Lobster is able to capture emotions within an emotionless world. Camera angles work to provide glimpses into the severity of life and mysterious musical strings accompany characters during intense of chaotic scenes, even though not much action is portrayed on screen. Dialogue is simplistic, yet packed with a punch that offers more to the story at first glance. This dark drama tries to capture the future of society within a very simplistic way of shooting and it delivers. However, with an open ending the audience is left with an uneasy feeling and a search for answers that cannot be found, much like that of the film. The film is left waiting, much like that of the characters in their lives, and the audience. (Anna)

The Nightcrawler – review by Anna

The Nightcrawler

Review by Anna:

Nightcrawler, a term used to identify an individual or group of people that film crime scenes and horrific accidents that happen during the night, is a film that questions just how far one might go to get the perfect shot. Louis Bloom, a currently unemployed low-life, gets entangled within the world of nightcrawlers. He starts out with a small camcorder and constantly gets to the scenes just a minute too late. However, as the film progresses, so does Louis’ knowledge and skills of nightcrawling. Perhaps the only redeeming factor of Louis’ character is that he is played by Jake Gyllenhal whose ability to portray an array of deadpan expressions is outstanding. The otherwise boring nature of the film is contrasted by the accidents documented by the nightcrawers. AS the accidents become more violent and disturbing, so does the main character, willing to do absolutely anything to get the perfect shot. Louis is not afraid to endanger the lives of people around him, clearly a parallel to the violence he documents every night. Ironically, this delusion and narcissism are what lead to Louis’ ultimate success instead of downfall. There are no consequences for Louis’ actions, just the people he surrounds himself with to no fault of their own.