50 Movies Where Evil Won

Plot: A sociopathic drifter begins to make a living recording unethical crime scene footage to sell to a corrupt news station. 

Dan Gilroy's terrific examination of the corruption within the mass media of today is led by Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), who stands as one of the most hateful film leads of all time. A slimy, cruel, and aberrant movie monster who'll make your skin crawl, he's uncomfortable to watch every second he's on-screen, thanks in large part to Gyllenhaal's career-best, unbelievably great performance. 

While other, similarly repellent movie leads - such as Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street), Daniel Plainview (There Will Be Blood), Lou Ford (The Killer Inside Me), and Alex DeLarge (A Clockwork Orange) - do face the consequences of their actions and fail significantly in some way, that's not the case here. Bloom gets away with everything. 

By the end of Nightcrawler, Lou has deliberately caused a competitor (Bill Paxton) to be severely injured in a car crash, he's sexually abused his boss (Rene Russo), he's allowed several people to die just so that he can get the perfect shot, and he even engineers the death of his assistant (Riz Ahmed). A police detective who interviews Bloom knows what he is, but cannot prove it, and so Bloom walks away and even expands his business, hiring a bunch of interns to join him.

It's an ending that will fill viewers with rage, just as it was probably designed to.