Nightcrawler (2014)

If this were about the beloved X-Man, I would have seen it in a theater. If it were about an earthworm, I might still have seen it earlier. But for all its popularity, I must not have liked what I'd gleaned about it, or I would have put it on my Netflix list. Instead, it was the first halfway-promising result I hadn't watched when I browsed on another account.

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) has been a sometimes violent sneak thief, but he wants a more legitimate job. At the scene of a car crash, he decides to make videos of newsworthy nighttime incidents and sell them to a struggling L.A. news station. He gets too close for the comfort of emergency personnel, but morning news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) craves such sensational footage. Lou enlists desperate intern Rick (Riz Ahmed) to help navigate to addresses mentioned on scanned police radio signals. In his business ambitions, Lou has so little regard for laws and ethics that he might have done less damage as a thief.

Okja (2017)

This pre-Parasite Bong Joon Ho hit had been sitting on my list for some time. Every once in a while, someone would either praise it or, less often, diss it. Neither the title nor the poster appealed to me, but eventually, I decided to know for sure how to feel about it.

The fictitious Mirando Corporation, under new CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton), has been breeding "super pigs" larger in adulthood than hippos and with exceptionally efficient metabolism. The plan, of course, is to combat human hunger. A rural South Korean farmer (Byun Hee-bong) has raised reputedly the most magnificent super pig, Okja. But But Mija (Seo-hyun Ahn), his early teen granddaughter, has grown too attached and doesn't want her taken to Mirando HQ in New York City. Being more headstrong than smart, Mija sets out for the Mirando station in Seoul without a plan....

Source Code (2011)

This is one of those titles that automatically turned me off: "I'm not enough of a computer geek to get into this." But such snap judgments lose their effectiveness with time, and the continuing popularity of SC was hard for me to ignore. Besides, I liked director Duncan Jones' work on Moon, and here was another sci-fi.

Twenty minutes into the future, if the already dated phone tech is any indication, a terrorist bombs a train in the Chicago area. An experimental government program under Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) retrieves the last eight minutes of memory from one of the victims and sends the mind of biologically similar U.S. Army CPT Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) into it, enabling him to spend eight minutes finding the bomb and its planter however he can. He can retry any number of times, but the sooner he succeeds, the better their chances of preventing the bomber's next attack.

Prisoners (2013)

At one time, I would have refused to see this. It seemed to me that revenge flicks were largely just an excuse to have a "hero" behaving more nastily than usual. But I have discovered my taste for them, whether we're supposed to root for the protagonist or recognize that he's in the wrong. In this case, I knew it was bigger on drama than action.

Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Frank Birch (Terrence Howard) are friends through their first-grade daughters -- who go missing at the same time. Laconic, low-IQ Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is soon apprehended as a suspected kidnapper, but the evidence is too circumstantial to hold him for long; and despite the request of Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the chief lets him go totally free. Having slightly more evidence to convince him, however inadmissible in court, Keller kidnaps Alex and enlists Frank's reluctant help in trying to torture their daughters' whereabouts out of him, keeping this secret from their respective wives, Grace (Maria Bello) and Nancy (Viola Davis). Meanwhile, Loki continues to look for the girls and Alex -- sometimes following Keller.