Enemy: Villeneuve's Spider, the Double, and the Dread

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Denis Villeneuve is now the most reliable maker of large, serious science fiction alive — Arrival, the two Dune films, Blade Runner 2049 — a director trusted with the biggest canvases in the genre. Enemy, made in 2013 in the gap before all of that, is the film that explains him, and it is the least like any of them: small, sick-yellow, sparsely scored, ninety minutes of mounting dread with barely a plot to hold on to. It is the one where you can watch him work out, in private, the obsessions the blockbusters would later dress in scale. If you want to know what Villeneuve is actually afraid of, this is the file.

Nightcrawler: Gyllenhaal, the Camera, and the Ghoul of Los Angeles

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Some films arrive already knowing what they are. Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s 2014 directorial debut, opens on a man stealing chain-link fencing and manhole covers under a freeway overpass, and by the time he has talked his way out of an encounter with a security guard, you understand the entire moral universe of the picture. Louis Bloom is a thief who reads business-seminar jargon the way other men read scripture. He is looking for a career. Los Angeles, filmed as a smear of sodium light and empty boulevards, is about to hand him one.

Jake Gyllenhaal - vo.rs

Enemy: Villeneuve's Spider, the Double, and the Dread

Nightcrawler: Gyllenhaal, the Camera, and the Ghoul of Los Angeles