Jake Gyllenhaal has flirted with unlikeable characters in the past, but his performance in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler is something truly revelatory.

As Lou Bloom, a skeletal, hollow-eyed predator who stalks the Los Angeles night with a video camera in search of footage of violent crimes he can sell to local newscasts, Gyllenhaal is eerily convincing. You can see his eyes, but there’s nothing behind them. Spouting canned self-help jargon any time he’s cornered, he’s a sociopath who’s found his calling: charging people money to show them awful things that don’t bother him in the slightest.

“He is our first responder, do you know what I mean?” the actor tells me the day after the movie’s world premiere at TIFF. “It’s funny that someone like him exists, and it’s terrifying, because it speaks to that moment in yourself when you go, ‘Am I gonna click on that? Am I gonna look at that video? Or am I not?’ And whether you do or you don’t, that moment in you? That is Lou Bloom. He is the ultimate entrepreneur, and his is the ultimate success story for today.”

“Dan [director Gilroy] is saying that we believe success is, work hard enough, you get away with it – and that’s goodness. But that’s not the case with Lou, and I don’t think Dan is saying that’s the case with the majority of people who have a certain type of success. And that’s a fascinating thing.

“All of the things we’ve been taught: ‘Visualize a goal. Go as hard toward that goal as possible.’ Well, it doesn’t take into account those who don’t have empathy.”

Gyllenhaal, fortunately, has plenty of empathy. That’s how he figured out who Lou was.

“Acting can be a selfish, immature art, but I also think it can breed empathy if you decide to really prepare and research,” he says. “It’s about looking at yourself, parts of yourself, that are making decisions like Lou Bloom. There are pieces of all of us that have those qualities, and I think that’s interesting.”

So does Gyllenhaal see Lou Bloom as a monster? The actor won’t say, exactly.

“I look [objectively] and go, ‘Okay, is this guy a sociopath?’” he says. “And then I’ve gotta throw that out and enter [his] world.”

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

Dan Gilroy has done a lot of work as a screenwriter, not all of it especially memorable. (His credits include Freejack, Chasers, Two For The Money and The Bourne Legacy.) So when it came to making his directorial debut, he was careful to try to make something that would stick with people. The result is Nightcrawler, a moody thriller opening this week starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a Los Angeles tabloid videographer who trolls the city for footage of car crashes and violent crime – and discovers that his total lack of humanity makes him great at his job. It does indeed stick. Nightcrawler became one of the breakout hits of TIFF and one of this fall’s most-anticipated releases. I sat down with Gilroy a few hours before the world premiere.

See Listings.

What was the starting point for the project?

I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I was very interested in the crime photographer Weegee. He lived in New York City and was the first person to put a police scanner in his car and drive around to crime scenes. But I couldn’t figure out a way to tell that story – it’s a period story, and it had already been done with Joe Pesci [in 1992 as The Public Eye]. 

Then I moved to Los Angeles a number of years ago and heard about these nightcrawlers. Shortly after that I came up with the character of Lou Bloom and I suddenly saw a way to plug the two together so that it had relevance to me.

Was it the compulsion that connected them for you? 

I wanted to update the Weegee story. They were driving around Los Angeles at a hundred miles an hour [and] they didn’t have cameras like Weegee had. They had video cameras. And then cinematically we were looking at screens within screens – like when [Lou] enters the crime scene and we’re focusing more on his viewfinder than the wider shot. That was interesting cinematically.

The movie’s vision of Los Angeles isn’t what we usually see. It’s utterly unglamorous. Lou isn’t interested in celebrities and never goes anywhere near a red carpet or a fancy hotel. He’s all about crime and blood.

Los Angeles is usually portrayed as a place of social decay and I very much see it more as a place of struggle and survival. There’s just a wild, untamed spirit. It’s a place of mountains and deserts and coyotes and oceans and earthquakes. So Robert Elswit, the wonderful director of photography, and I were trying to show an L.A. that did not have a man-made component. We were much more interested in a sort of natural beauty. 

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

The first Wednesday of the month means a new Doc Soup is served at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema; November’s premiere is Last Days In Vietnam. And if you think you’ve seen all there is to see about the Vietnam war, well, here’s 97 minutes that you haven’t.         

Directed by Rory Kennedy (Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib, Ethel), Last Days In Vietnam looks at the absolute chaos of the final weeks of America’s presence in the convulsing nation. The war effort was collapsing into incoherence, half a million civilians were trying to claim refugee status so they could escape through the U.S. embassy in Saigon, and Americans were doing everything they could to save individual lives.

Four decades on, Kennedy and her crew have collected stories from Americans and Vietnamese who were there, matching them to archival footage to construct a narrative that’s as close to definitive as possible.

It’s a fascinating story of institutional denial and personal commitment, both of which are somehow bound up in the personal arc of Graham Martin, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam who refused to acknowledge the deteriorating state of the war, but finally reversed himself to marshal a last-ditch effort to evacuate hundreds of people.

Last Days In Vietnam screens at 6:30 and 9:15 pm Wednesday (November 5) and again Thursday (November 6) at 6:45 pm. At press time, the early Wednesday show and Thursday’s show had gone rush; tickets for the late Wednesday show were still available here.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund) is a bone-dry dissection of bourgeois happiness: you may have a great job and a loving family, but it can all be lost in a moment’s foolishness. When a picture-perfect Swedish family – Johannes Kuhnke and Ebba as the parents and real-life siblings Clara and Vincent Wettergren as the children – takes a skiing vacation in the French Alps, the dad panics in a moment of potential crisis, destroying his standing as benevolent patriarch and sending him into a spiral of self-justification. The deeper he digs, the funnier Force Majeure gets, and the more perceptive and uncomfortable it becomes. It goes on a little longer than it needs to, but that’s really my only complaint. Some subtitles. 118 min.

Rating: NNNN (NW)

Opens Oct 31 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.

Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy) is a twitchy Los Angeles thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a creepy loner who worms his way into a career as a freelance videographer, chasing car crashes and murders and selling his footage to a TV news director (Rene Russo) who’s just as ethically flexible as he is. Writer-director Gilroy’s script is less interested in social commentary than in crafting a slippery character study, and Gyllenhaal is perfectly suited to that – face gaunt, eyes blazing with demented self-confidence and showing no humanity whatsoever, he’s like a man grown out of synthetic meat in a lab. His performance will keep you watching even as Nightcrawler backs itself into a narrative corner. 117 min.

Rating: NNNN (NW)

Opens Oct 31 at Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Cineplex VIP Cinemas Don Mills, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande - Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

ABCs of Death 2 (various directors) follows the same formula as its predecessors, assembling 26 horror shorts – each taking its subject from a letter of the alphabet – from 26 different filmmaking teams. And as with the original, the result is a very mixed bag, since some directors are far more capable of telling a story (or delivering a scare) than others. Standouts include Rodney (Room 237) Ascher’s questionnaire creeper, Julian (The Mighty Boosh) Barratt’s found-footage goof, Vanishing Waves collaborators Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s unsettling alien-invasion tale and Inside and Livid directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s intensely creepy babysitting sketch. But the ones that don’t work really don’t work, and you’ll be very aware of the running time after three duds in a row. Some subtitles. 122 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Oct 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.

Horns (Alexandre Aja) stars Daniel Radcliffe as a small-town DJ cracking under the strain of being a suspect in the murder of his girlfriend (Juno Temple). After drunkenly desecrating her memorial site, he wakes up the next morning with horns sprouting from his head and a curious ability to make people reveal their most awful secrets. Radcliffe’s a good choice for the lead – you never suspect for a moment that he could actually kill anyone – and director Aja (High Tension, the recent Hills Have Eyes remake) clearly loves the grungy, magic-realist heart of Joe Hill’s novel. But the pacing’s lumpy, with much of the midsection spent watching the tormented hero interrogating one person after another about the night of the murder, and the tone doesn’t quite slide from absurd dark comedy to proper suspense. When it works, it works really well, but after a while Horns just wears you down.  120 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Oct 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.

Young Ones (Jake Paltrow) positions itself as a nifty fusion of western tropes and dystopian sci-fi, with Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Elle Fanning playing homesteaders surviving in a drought-devastated California not too far in the future. (The conflict is over water rather than cattle or oil, but the emotions are basically the same.) As he did with his first feature, The Good Night, writer-director Paltrow has paired a top-notch cast with a novel idea, but he struggles with individual scenes and can’t quite figure out how to land the ending. (His vision of the future is also frustratingly limited.) The sun-blasted South African locations provide impressively alien terrain, and the actors keep you engaged – Shannon is so good that I wanted the whole movie to be about his character – but something’s always just a little off. And the longer Young Ones goes on, the clearer that becomes.  100 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Oct 31 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.

Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffe) stars a quivering Nicole Kidman as an amnesiac who wakes up every morning next to a husband (Colin Firth) she can’t remember because of an accident (or attempted murrrderrr?) that’s also robbed her of the ability to sustain new memories beyond a day. Perhaps the filmmakers were hoping we forgot Christopher Nolan’s Memento, from which they borrow freely to diminished effect. Christine must solve a whodunit while in an exceptionally vulnerable spot where she can’t trust the people who claim to be her husband, doctor and best friend. Director Joffe’s tight framing never allows us to know more than Christine, but despite the effective tension and confusion, with every reveal and explanation the film becomes more hammy and ridiculous. A lean B-movie thriller is buried somewhere within this preposterous story, one that could have left us rattled in the darkwithout all the faux explanations.. 92 min.

Rating: NN (RS)

Opens Oct 31 at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg) takes Bruce Wagner’s satirical Hollywood novel and turns it into… well, whatever it is now, it’s not satire. It’s a flat, psychologically trite tale of absent parents and ruined children, with Julianne Moore as a neurotic actor trying to land a part originally played by her famous, and famously dead, mother (Sarah Gadon, glimpsed in clips and hallucinations). Mia Wasikowska plays a troubled young woman who arrives in Los Angeles on a collision course with an even more troubled child star (Evan Bird) whose parents (John Cusack, Olivia Williams) have at least one terrible secret of their own. Also, Robert Pattinson drives a limo. There are some interesting ideas knocking around, and the theme of parents’ mistakes literally haunting their children is a perfect metaphor for Cronenberg. But there’s no centre to the script, which simply wanders back and forth between the characters with no real point or logic. Nothing has any impact, and the biggest revelations are sort of left hanging.  112 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Oct 31 at Colossus, Queensway, SilverCity Yonge, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Varsity. See here for times.

Full disclosure, folks: I have pieces of 2001: A Space Odyssey framed and mounted on my wall. Actual 70mm clips, from Reel 5. That is how highly I regard that movie, and how highly I regard Stanley Kubrick. With the notable exception of Eyes Wide Shut, because seriously, come on.

I put that out there so you can understand my anticipation for TIFF’s Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, which opens tomorrow (October 31) at the Lightbox. It runs to January 25, 2015, but don’t dawdle on booking those tickets; Kubrick fans have jammed previous versions of the exhibition, which premiered in Frankfurt in 2004 and has cycled through a number of cities over the subsequent decade. This is its only Canadian installation.

TIFF’s gallery space – used so impressively last year for David Cronenberg: Evolution – is nicely suited to a chronological exploration of Kubrick’s works.

There are many, many stills. Kubrick famously started out as a photographer, and his motion pictures have the meticulous, methodical construction that feels like the signature of someone who obsesses over every element in his frame. So it makes a kind of sense that his films should be represented by at least one wall of images: candids from the locations of Killer’s Kiss, glamour shots of Sue Lyons in Lolita, stylized poster images for A Clockwork Orange, and so forth. Clips from the features play constantly in each room, the sound bleeding over from one to the other. (During yesterday’s media tour, the triumphant climax of 2001’s Also Sprach Zarathustra could be heard throughout the exhibit, adding an intriguing new level to a battle scene from Spartacus.)

The biggest films – Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining – get the niftiest showcases. The centrepiece of the Strangelove room is a striking model of the American war room, designed by Ken Adam; it’s accompanied by props, stills and a marvellously pissy letter to Kubrick from one Mrs. F.J. Dobbs, who wrote the director to protest the “filth and boring dialogue” that drove her and her husband from the picture house in 1964. (This was not Kubrick’s first brush with negative feedback; the Lolita room has a handful of letters from assorted Christian decency leagues, and the director’s characteristically considered response to one of them.)

2001 is divided into two sections, an earthbound area focusing on the Dawn Of Man sequence – with a full-body ape suit and a more detailed headpiece used for close-ups, and that pesky, unknowable monolith - and an enclosed space devoted to the Jupiter voyage that makes up the film’s second half. A model of the spaceship Discovery is suspended overhead as you wander past a model of the ship’s gravity-creating centrifuge, a replica HAL 9000 panel, gels from the ship’s display screens, a spacesuit and dozens upon dozens of stills.

Then it’s on to A Clockwork Orange, honored here both for its pop-art futurism and its blatant sexual imagery. Replicas of the Moloko Milk Bar statues and that godawful penis ottoman vie for your attention with Alex DeLarge’s record player and Droog suit; it’s strange to see them as museum pieces, removed from the film’s created world. Stripped of their uncomfortable resonance, they’re just props.

There’s no such disconnect with The Shining, which TIFF has intentionally created as a sort of disquieting waxworks. With a re-creation of the Overlook Hotel’s geometrical carpeting underneath our feet, we can tour the film’s nightmares at our leisure. There’s Jack Torrance’s typewriter, the model of the hedge maze, the dresses of the spectral twins, complete with faded (fake) blood stains, Wendy’s knife, Jack’s axes; they’re all here. Even Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater gets a place of prominence, presumably to drive the conspiracy nuts of Room 237 even further up the wall.

Full Metal Jacket gets less consideration, possibly because it’s been relegated to “lesser Kubrick” status in the canon, though I’ve never fully understood why. (Seriously, watch it again – ideally at TIFF’s December 12 screening, which will be introduced by Adam Nayman – and marvel at its controlled, ferocious beauty.) The exhibit room replicates a cramped military barracks, with a handful of props arranged around Joker’s bunk bed. There’s also a marvelous diagram showing how a former coke-smelting plant in East London was redressed to serve as the city of Hue, mainly because Kubrick refused to leave England to shoot on location.

Speaking of which: I’d always wondered how Kubrick got those block-long tracking shots of Tom Cruise on the streets of New York City in Eyes Wide Shut, since he directed the entire production in London and would never have entrusted a frame of his film to someone else. Turns out he took over two city blocks in London – Hatton Garden, in Camden – and turned them over into Lower Manhattan.

The diagram that shows how Kubrick’s crew achieved this remarkable, almost insane labour is the highlight of the Eyes Wide Shut section, at least for me; otherwise, it’s a lot of orgy costumes, masks and headdresses that remind us once again that “Sexy Amadeus Cast Member” is a really silly design choice.

Of course, if you can’t abide the thought of revisiting that one movie, you can just march through the room on your way out. The rest of the exhibition is absolutely worth your time, just like the rest of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography. Tickets for both are on sale now.

Tonight is Halloween night, and all of Toronto’s repertory cinemas unleash their horrors. Because, you know, it’s fun to sit in the dark with a couple hundred people and wait for something awful to happen.

The Royal lines up Poltergeist at 7 pm, Mr. Vampire 3 at 9:30 pm and Night Of The Creeps at 11:30 pm; the Bloor has Shadow Cast performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at 7 pm and 10:30 pm, the Revue offers a Hitchcock double-bill of Psycho at 7 pm and Frenzy at 9 pm and the Fox unleashes The Exorcist at 7 pm (in the inferior 2000 reissue, mind) and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street at 9:30 pm.

TIFF kicks off its massive Stanley Kubrick retrospective with The Shining at 6:30 pm, introduced by the late filmmaker’s brother-in-law and longtime producer Jan Harlan. And if you’re looking for something a little less intense, the Lightbox is also showing Andrew Fleming’s kitschy teen-witch thriller The Craft at 10 pm as part of its Back to the ’90s series. Bring friends.

There’s also the regular-release horror of Horns and ABCs Of Death 2, if you’re looking for something a little more recent. But if the weather gets too grim for you, I can also suggest 31 reasons to stay home, nicely compiled by yours truly for John Hodgman’s Scary Movie Club. Hodgman tsk-tsked at my inclusion of Alien and omission of The Brood, but we both forgot one of the most effective creepers of them all: George Sluzier’s The Vanishing, reissued just this month in a splendid Criterion special edition.

Bring it home on Blu-ray if you want to experience genuine dread and terror … or, you know, just leave it out on the coffee table to scare the crap out of the next person who drops by.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

This tender doc, presented by Cinema Politica in collaboration with the LGBTQ Parenting Network, DOC Toronto and Point of View Magazine, offers a groundbreaking look at the experience of trans parents.

First-time feature director Rémy Huberdeau gives voice to a diverse collection of trans people, some who transitioned after they had families, some who parented during and after transitioning and many who are active in Toronto’s trans community.

They all have fascinating stories and points of view. Syrus, for example, went through what sounds like a hormonal reversal in order to become a parent – an emotional challenge for him. Aiyyana describes her pleasure at becoming a grandmother and promotes a fluid definition of gender.

Hershel, who transitioned after becoming a parent and has a strong relationship with his son Lee, describes in beautifully self-aware ways how he may have underestimated the impact of his personal changes on his son.

Huberdeau shoots families in their everyday lives – cooking, getting ready for bed – as part of his strategy to normalize his very engaging subjects’ situations. And some of the testimony – especially Syrus’s partner Nik’s description of the birth of their child – will be familiar to any parent who’s witnessed those spectacular moments when a partner gives birth.

As a whole, though, Transgender Parents is like no movie you’ve ever seen.

Huberdeau and the doc’s participants attend the screening Tuesday (November 4), 6:30 pm, at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See listings.

A decade and a half after his death, is there anything left to say about Stanley Kubrick?

Well, sure. His filmography is remarkable for its resonance, continuing to reveal new secrets and meanings every time it’s explored. His predatory tracking shots and clinical framing have become a genre unto themselves; the term “Kubrickian” instantly communicates the idea of an austere vision, dispassionate or even merciless, in which human protagonists struggle against systems they barely understand.

What is the meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey? What’s really going on in The Shining? How can the same artist have made A Clockwork Orange, which embraces anarchy and hedonism, and Full Metal Jacket, which suggests the depersonalization of military training is the only thing that enables men to survive the chaos of war? And what’s the deal with the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut?

I’m happy to spend hours discussing everything but the last question. Eyes Wide Shut is a terrible, terrible movie, its ludicrous eroticism laughably defended as dreamlike and surreal by people who really should know better. But I digress.

In support of Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition – opening at the Lightbox Friday (October 31) after an acclaimed run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – TIFF Cinematheque is launching a full retrospective of Kubrick’s work. Everything’s here, from his earliest short films to the post-mortem projects A.I. Artificial Intelligence (a long-gestating Kubrick project picked up by Steven Spielberg after his friend’s death) and Room 237, Rodney Ascher’s documentary dissecting the supposed hidden meanings that lurk within Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining.

TIFF launches the series with a weekend of special guests. Long-time Kubrick producer Jan Harlan introduces The Shining Friday (October 31); a fairly impressive double bill on Saturday (November 1) offers a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the presence of Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, who played the film’s beleaguered astronauts, and Harlan and his sister Christiane Kubrick – the director’s widow – discuss their final collaboration, Eyes Wide Shut.

Other scheduled guests include visual effects designer Douglas Trumbull on 2001: A Space Odyssey (November 7), Positif editor Michel Ciment on A Clockwork Orange (November 8), UCLA archivist Jan-Christopher Horak on Spartacus (November 15), actor Alan Cumming on Eyes Wide Shut (December 1), Toronto film critic Adam Nayman on Full Metal Jacket (December 12) and Jesse Wente, the Lightbox’s director of programming, on The Killing (January 18, 2015).

I’m most intrigued by the inclusion of Kubrick’s rarely screened international version of The Shining, which plays just once on November 25. At 25 minutes shorter than the North American release, TIFF describes it as “a more enigmatic and oblique version of the film.” (The domestic cut is pretty enigmatic and oblique as it is, so you can imagine my curiosity.)

If you care about cinema, you’ve likely seen most of Kubrick’s films already. See them again; they can take it. And if you’ve never seen 2001, you’re going to want to address that immediately; TIFF’s 70mm print – which screens for a week beginning November 7 – is a thing of endless, majestic beauty.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

Screenwriter Dan Gilroy (Freejack, Two For The Money) makes his directorial debut with this twitchy Los Angeles thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a creepy loner who worms his way into a career as a freelance videographer, chasing car crashes and murders and selling his footage to a TV news director (Rene Russo) who’s just as ethically flexible as he is.

Gilroy’s script is less interested in social commentary than in crafting a slippery character study, and Gyllenhaal is perfectly suited to that – face gaunt, eyes blazing with demented self-confidence and showing no humanity whatsoever, he’s like a man grown out of synthetic meat in a lab somewhere.

And his performance keeps you watching even as Nightcrawler backs itself into a narrative corner.

Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is being described as a domestic drama, a character study and a social comedy. All of those things are true, more or less: the film, in which a Swedish family’s bourgeois happiness is shattered during a skiing vacation in the French Alps, is funny and excoriating in equal measure.

In a little room underneath his distributor’s office, Östlund, who shot ski films in his early 20s, tells me the whole thing started because he was looking for an excuse to go back to the slopes. And then he happened on a YouTube clip.

“It was a group of tourists sitting in an outdoor restaurant [who] saw an avalanche on a distant mountain peak,” he says. “And what I was interested in was the three seconds when the crowd goes from joyful to nervous laughter and then to total panic. Only the snow [mist] reached the restaurant, but people were panicking. And they had to deal with their embarrassment after, when they were walking back to the tables. 

“I had the idea of having a family go on a ski vacation and experience this. I told a friend of mine who is an actor, and the next day he came back and said, ‘What if only the father runs away?’ And immediately I understood: here is something we can build a feature film around. 

“I started to ask myself questions about gender and the roles we play – how to be a father and a man. It just opened up a lot of questions, and everything fell into place.”

Force Majeure sets its psychological treatise against the gorgeous backdrop of a ski resort in the French Alps. Did it feel strange to stage something this intense in a place where people are supposed to be having the time of their lives?

“Yeah, well,” he says with a smile. “The only happy image of a vacation is in the travel agency’s commercials.”

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner