Lou Bloom looks like a self-help book that learned how to hunt. Jake Gyllenhaal’s unnervingly polite cameraman discovers that car crashes, murders and frightened homeowners can all become career opportunities if he gets there before the police. Nightcrawler never asks us to secretly root for Lou; it simply watches, fascinated, as a man with absolutely no moral brakes finds an industry willing to reward him. | © Bold Films
Daniel Plainview doesn’t really want money as much as he wants everyone else to lose. Daniel Day-Lewis turns the oilman into a magnificent black hole of greed, resentment and competitive hatred, gradually stripping away whatever humanity might have existed underneath. Paul Thomas Anderson somehow makes watching a misanthropic tycoon ruin himself and everyone nearby feel as grand and imposing as a biblical epic. | © Paramount Vantage
Jordan Belfort steals from ordinary people, cheats on his wife, abuses drugs and treats almost every human interaction as another transaction—and Martin Scorsese gives him one hell of a party. That contradiction is precisely why The Wolf of Wall Street works. Leonardo DiCaprio makes Belfort dangerously entertaining without hiding the emptiness beneath the sales pitches, yachts and Quaalude-fueled gymnastics. | © Red Granite Pictures
Henry Hill’s great trick is making organized crime sound like the best job anybody ever had. The restaurants, cash, clothes and instant respect arrive first; the murders, paranoia and betrayals quietly follow. Ray Liotta’s easygoing narration pulls us into Henry’s worldview so smoothly that Martin Scorsese barely needs to wag a finger—the ugliness of these men eventually sells itself. | © Warner Bros.
Patrick Bateman is a murderer, a narcissist and, perhaps most unforgivably to Patrick Bateman, occasionally mistaken for one of his coworkers. Christian Bale attacks the role with such absurd commitment that Bateman becomes both horrifying and completely ridiculous. Mary Harron’s satire understands that his obsession with status, business cards and restaurant reservations is inseparable from the monster underneath the designer suit. | © Pressman Film
Howard Ratner could solve most of his problems by making one sensible decision, which means he naturally makes twelve terrible ones instead. Adam Sandler plays the jeweler as an exhausting bundle of charm, selfishness and gambling addiction, forever convinced that the next enormous risk will erase the previous disaster. Watching him operate is like watching someone sprint toward an open manhole while negotiating another bet on his phone. | © A24
Tom Ripley wants the clothes, the holidays, the friendships and eventually the identity of people born into a world that excludes him. Matt Damon initially makes Tom awkward enough to invite sympathy, which only makes his transformation more unsettling once envy starts turning into murder and impersonation. Anthony Minghella wraps all of that ugliness in beautiful Italian scenery, because apparently sociopathy also photographs wonderfully on the Amalfi Coast. | © Paramount Pictures
Alex DeLarge is charismatic, funny, intelligent and monstrously violent—a combination Stanley Kubrick uses to make the audience uncomfortable with its own attention. Malcolm McDowell never softens Alex into a misunderstood rebel; he simply makes him magnetic enough that looking away becomes difficult. The film then complicates matters further by asking whether a society that removes a person’s ability to choose evil has actually created anything morally better. | © Warner Bros.
Jake LaMotta can take punishment in the ring far better than he can handle life outside it. Robert De Niro plays him as jealous, suspicious and frighteningly self-destructive, a man capable of turning love into another form of combat. Raging Bull refuses the easy sports-movie route of making talent equal virtue; being an extraordinary boxer does absolutely nothing to stop Jake from becoming unbearable to the people closest to him. | © Chartoff-Winkler Productions
Nick and Amy Dunne have the kind of marriage that makes being single look medically advisable. David Fincher’s thriller keeps rearranging our sympathies as infidelity, deception, resentment and something far darker emerge beneath the polished anniversary photos. Rosamund Pike gets the flashier descent into nightmare territory, but Gone Girl works because nearly everyone involved is busy weaponizing appearances, especially when a television camera happens to be nearby. | © 20th Century Fox
Tony Montana announces exactly who he is almost immediately and then spends nearly three hours proving he somehow undersold it. Al Pacino’s Cuban gangster is ambitious, paranoid, violent and spectacularly incapable of recognizing when enough is enough. Brian De Palma turns his ascent into excessive gangster opera, then makes the excess itself the joke: Tony finally gets the mansion, money and mountain of cocaine, and remains profoundly miserable. | © Universal Pictures
Calling Harvey Keitel’s character a “bad lieutenant” is a little like calling a hurricane inconvenient. He gambles, steals, abuses his authority and spends much of Abel Ferrara’s film sinking deeper into behavior that would make redemption seem almost insulting. Yet Keitel commits so completely to the man’s spiritual collapse that the movie eventually becomes less about liking him than wondering whether forgiveness has any meaning if only decent people can receive it. | © Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation
J.J. Hunsecker destroys people with a newspaper column; Sidney Falco happily does the legwork if it might improve his table reservation. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis make an exquisitely poisonous pair in this razor-sharp portrait of New York publicity culture, trading insults and favors like currency. The remarkable part is how modern their sleaze still feels—replace the gossip column with social media and half these guys could be working tomorrow morning. | © Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions
Johnny can be funny enough to make you briefly forget that spending an evening with him would be a catastrophic mistake. David Thewlis gives Mike Leigh’s drifter an extraordinary intelligence that he mostly uses to humiliate, provoke and emotionally attack everyone unfortunate enough to share a room with him. His endless observations about society may sound profound, but the film never lets intellectual cleverness become an excuse for cruelty. | © Thin Man Films
Bridget Gregory doesn’t need a tragic backstory, a redemption arc or anyone’s permission to be absolutely terrible. Linda Fiorentino plays her as a coolly practical predator who steals drug money from her husband, disappears and immediately begins manipulating another man into something far worse. John Dahl’s neo-noir lets Bridget occupy a role traditionally reserved for male antiheroes, then refuses to punish her simply because convention says a woman this ruthless eventually has to lose. | © ITC Entertainment Group
A protagonist doesn’t need to be likable to be impossible to watch away from. Some of cinema’s best movies follow liars, criminals, narcissists, killers, and people who somehow get worse every time they make a decision. These are films that put awful human beings at the center of the story—and are all the better for it.
