Nightcrawler
I read a comment on Twitter earlier today that satire had ended the day Barrack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Putting aside the specious rationale of that particular bestowal it’s true that modern satire lacks something in grandeur and ferocity. It’s the age of The Onion and The Daily Show ; more wisecracks than wizening. Last year the cinema brought us Spring Breakers , The Bling Ring and The Wolf of Wall Street ; celebrations of hedonistic vacuity that wanted to have their cake and eat it, or perhaps a more fitting analogy might be going to an exclusive restaurant and being served a Big Mac. We could see the joke but the nagging suspicion remained that the gag was really on us and that the films were more an indulgence of style over substance. Which in a way makes Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler a pleasingly old school contrast in its lacerating of the American Dream and that age-old scourge of...