Lovely & Amazing (2001)

Comedy-drama written and directed by Nicole Holofcener.

Jane Marks (Brenda Blethyn) is the mother of two grown-up daughters, Michelle (Catherine Keener) and Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer). Jane has also adopted a pre-teen girl called Annie (Raven Goodwin). Each of them experiences various ups and downs in their personal lives, and the story expertly examines these domestic threads and how they interrelate.

Catherine Keener absolutely shines as a would-be artist who cannot sell her craft creations. She goes to work in a photo-development shop and becomes involved with a teenage co-worker (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal), with inevitable consequences.

It’s a funny and perceptive film that’s highly entertaining.

Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher’s highly skilled dramatisation of the remarkable true story about the so-called “Zodiac killer”, who murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s. 

Mark Ruffalo plays the cop investigating. Robert Downey Jr is a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle. And Jake Gyllenhaal is Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist at the same paper who becomes obsessed with the case and intent on solving it, no matter what.

Ruffalo and Gyllenhaal are such sensitive performers that they build huge depth into their characters. Downey Jr. is less impressive. Nothing wrong with him as such, but he makes less of an impact.

I like the way the film charts the passing years, and keeps the narrative on the ongoing quest to resolve the case rather than veering off too much into the personal soap operas of the main characters' changing lives. 

Prisoners (2013)

A gripping and terrifying thriller directed by Denis Villeneuve. 

In Conyers, Pennsylvania, two girls go missing – believed to be abducted. Their families begin to disintegrate under the strain, with one of the fathers (Hugh Jackman) resorting to increasingly extreme behaviour. 

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the local detective, desperately trying to find the girls despite the community and his own boss working against him. 

It’s brilliantly written, acted and photographed. There’s a genuinely creepy look to the rainswept houses and streets. 

Themes of religion, family and community run through the narrative, adding depth and texture.

Proof (2005)

Excellent drama, directed by John Madden and adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn. 

A brilliant mathematician, Robert Llewellyn (Anthony Hopkins), suffered mental problems and has recently died. His daughter Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) – also a genius with numbers – appears to suffer a similar condition. She has been caring for him in his troubled final years. After Robert’s death, Catherine’s controlling sister (Hope Davis) arrives from New York and tries to organise her. Meanwhile, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a former graduate student of Robert’s who wants to go through his papers and find out if he left anything else of worth.

All four characters are brilliantly drawn and portrayed. The dialogue is plausible. 

The “troubled maths genius” trope recalls Ron Howard’s 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, but there’s strong enough acting and a compelling enough premise to make this well worth watching.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

An intelligent, compassionate drama directed by Tom Ford. 

Amy Adams, as usual, is absolutely perfect in the role of Susan Morrow, an L.A. art gallery owner leading a wealthy but shallow life. Out of the blue she is sent the manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). Reading this narrative sets her off on a series of reflections on her own life. 

We also get to see the drama of the novel itself, in which the “fictionalised” Gyllenhaal and his fictionalised wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter are terrorised by a gang who force them off the road at night in West Texas. It’s harrowing stuff. 

A third thread explores how Susan and Edward came together and fell apart. 

The multiple connected stories are handled beautifully, with no confusion about what’s happening where or when. The transitions between the various plot lines are expertly realised, with the director finding images and motifs that mirror and echo each other. There’s emotional depth in the performances as well as some episodes as terrifying as any thriller. 

One point deducted for slightly intrusive music, and also for the horrible opening sequence of naked obese people dancing.

Nightcrawler (2013)

Grimly funny and deeply unsettling, this is a masterful crime drama that dabbles with the blackest comedy imaginable. 

Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) goes into business selling video footage of crime scenes to a TV network. He also has designs on their news editor, Nina (Rene Russo). But his work takes him into some extreme situations that reveal his amoral ruthlessness. 

The film expertly juggles various themes. There are the ethics of journalism’s involvement in personal tragedies, and questions about voyeurism. There’s also a brilliant strand of corporate satire, as Louis tutors and controls his assistant Rick (Riz Ahmed), lecturing him on business strategy and career advancement. It amuses and appals at the same time, because Louis seems simultaneously so utterly deranged and yet brilliant. 

It’s such an intelligent and well-paced film that you are immediately swept up into the protagonist’s murky world. Nothing you could add or remove would make it any better.

Source Code (2011)

Mind-bending sci-fi thriller. 

The plot is extremely difficult to summarise, but here goes: a U.S. Army Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself on a train journey into Chicago. The eight minutes that he experiences ends in a terrorist explosion that kills all of the passengers on board. He is forced to relive the same eight-minute stretch of time again and again until he can find the bomber and prevent the disaster. Meanwhile, in the intervals between each attempt he comes to in what seems like a helicopter cockpit, where he is advised and manipulated by a mysterious military unit led by Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright, who need him to succeed in his mission to prevent a series of even worse terrorist incidents. 

In narrative terms there’s a Groundhog Day element – the idea of repeating the same moments until you get them right – but the tone and feel are completely different. This is tense, taut and suspenseful, with a humanity that makes it more appealing than you might expect a tech thriller to be. 

Michelle Monaghan plays the woman he’s sat opposite on the train, who he falls for and wants to save. It’s complicated but the storytelling is excellently handled and it’s far more lucid than the summary above might suggest.

In 2018, Very Farmiga would show up again in an oddly similar train-terrorist thriller called The Commuter.

Everest (2015)

Disaster/survival film about the true-life events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster involving two climbing groups, led by Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal). Everything turns nasty when a storm blows in and the mountaineers find themselves badly underprepared. 

It’s an extremely tense drama that’s all the more affecting because these events actually happened. 

Josh Brolin plays Beck Weathers, who survives but loses his hands and nose to frostbite. Robin Wright plays his wife back home, hoping to coordinate a helicopter rescue attempt. 

Keira Knightley plays Rob Hall’s wife and does the “terrified spouse stuck at home” part better than most, probably because the role is fully developed and she’s given a character to explore. 

Also excellent is Emily Watson as Helen Wilton, the base camp manager. Her experience of the escalating horror conveys just what it must have been like to witness this nightmare and be powerless to stop it. 

The film doesn’t moralise or pass judgement on why the deaths occurred. Instead, it pieces together a narrative that lets you make up your own mind.

Life (2017)

Horror sci-fi directed by Daniel Espinosa. 

A crew of six aboard the International Space Station intercept samples from Mars that turn out to contain a deadly organism. This life form quickly grows in size and power, endangering the crew, the mission and possibly humanity itself. 

Life was criticised for being reminiscent of Alien and Gravity and it’s true that there are similarities with both of those classics. However, what it does it does extremely well: it’s suspenseful and even has a hint of the blackest humour – especially in the bitter twist of the ending. 

The six characters are well drawn and Rebecca Ferguson is especially convincing as Dr. Miranda North. The only thing that pulled me out of the film was that Jake Gyllenhaal plays a character who is too “weird” and “troubled” to fit the easygoing well-balanced profile of an astronaut. He would never have passed the psychometric tests for selection.

The music, by Jon Ekstrand, is terrific and does a lot to build the mood.

Donnie Darko (2001)

Richard Kelly’s deeply enigmatic, fascinating film straddles psychological thriller and horror-tinged mind-bender. Donnie is a troubled teenager who encounters a creature in a rabbit costume. This creature tells him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. As that countdown progresses, he continues to visit the boy and advise him on his actions, which become increasingly extreme. 

Meditations on the nature of time, reality and identity are set against the backdrop of an American suburb. The film develops several other strands: Patrick Swayze is the too-good-to-be-true motivational speaker Jim Cunningham, who has a polarising effect on the town, while Drew Barrymore is a school teacher too open-minded for the culture of the school. There’s also lots about Donnie’s family, who love him without understanding him. 

The ending can be taken multiple ways and I’m not sure you’re even meant to fully “understand” it. Instead, you are left with a glimpse into a powerful, multilayered world beneath or behind the one we take for granted. 

Jake Gyllenhaal is superb as the main character. His face has to convey menace, fear, amusement and confusion, and does so brilliantly. Katharine Ross is excellent as Donnie’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lillian Thurman. But, as with all great films, there’s not a single performance that could be improved upon.