10 Best Movie Screenplays Since 2010

Genre: Crime/Thriller Writer: Dan Gilroy

This feverous script succeeds because it contains one of modern cinema's greatest character, Lou Bloom- macabre, ruthless, brazenly tranquil yet simmering with a latent violence, Bloom is prepared to take any risk in order to succeed. From driving like a maniac to blackmailing, Bloom tampers with crime scenes to get his footage, until finally he will actually begins create the crimes he sells to the news stations. He's like a cross between Patrick Bateman and Travis Bickle, but with much more ambition.

Bloom's rise in the seedy underworld of LA crime is like a modern parable to what is rotten in today's society. The execution of the script is spot on. Free from sluglines or scene descriptions which can slow down the reading the process, Gilroy opts for one-word sentences which zip across the page like Bloom's Dodge Challenger tearing down the interstate for the next car crash or burn victim. It is one of the quickest-to-read scripts I've seen, though Gilroy would also go on to direct the film himself.

There is another reason for the success of Nightcrawler's screenplay, however. Often a main character has an arc, they start out one way but by the end of the story they have somehow changed. Not so with Bloom. He starts out as a low-life, killing a security guard for his gold watch, and finishes a low-life, video-recording the death of his assistant after organising a police shoot-out with some criminals. Bloom gets no comeuppance.

The arc actually belongs to the audience and plays to our guilt over our voyeurism- we consume the footage which men like Bloom provide, we allow the likes of him to rise in society, we are complicit in the world of citizen journalism- it is we who have fallen, not Bloom