Movies like Nightcrawler

Refn shoots Los Angeles like a synth-lit dream until the violence lands without warning. Ryan Gosling's unnamed driver barely speaks: he does movie stunts by day, wheels getaways by night, and wears a scorpion on his jacket in case you missed the point.

The tie to Nightcrawler is the city and the silence. Both men move through the same after-hours LA, both keep a void behind a calm face, and both films trust you to sit with someone you can admire and fear in the same shot.

Mann mounted digital cameras in a real moving cab and caught Los Angeles at night looking huge and lonely. Tom Cruise, hair gone grey, plays a contract killer who hires Jamie Foxx's driver for a shift of errands that keep turning ugly.

Think of it as Nightcrawler's night-shift twin. The predator rides shotgun here instead of working the camera, and the city pulls the same trick, lovely from a distance and cold up close. Watch them together and LA starts to feel like a character with a plan.

The Safdie brothers build panic like an alarm you can't shut off. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a New York jeweller who bets big, then bets the winnings, chasing a rush that was never really about money.

Howard and Lou Bloom run on the same fuel, appetite with no brake. Neither wants a calm life; they want the next score, and the wanting is the entire personality. This one swaps LA cool for flop-sweat, which makes the compulsion even harder to watch.

Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader gave us the first great night-shift loner. Travis Bickle drives a cab through a New York he can't stand, keeps a diary of big plans, and slowly convinces himself that violence counts as rescue.

Lou Bloom is Travis with a media plan. Both are insomniacs who mistake obsession for purpose and use the city as a stage for their own arrival. Nightcrawler inherits this film's whole nervous system, down to a camera that stays loyal to a man you would cross the street to avoid.

Harron turned Bret Easton Ellis's novel into a comedy about status, played just straight enough to unsettle you. Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman worships business cards and morning routines while something murderous idles underneath.

Bateman and Bloom speak the same dialect, the fluent and hollow language of self-improvement, used to cover a hole where a person should be. Harron's satire and Gilroy's thriller agree on one thing: the scariest sentence a man can say is "I'd like to talk about my future."

Anderson's oil epic hands Daniel Day-Lewis the room to build a monster out of sheer will. Daniel Plainview shows up with nothing, decides trust is a tool, and works his way across California turning everyone near him into leverage.

Take away the period costume and Plainview is Lou Bloom at biblical scale. The shared idea is ambition as an illness, the kind that treats affection as a bargaining chip and other people as raw material. Both films keep daring you to root for a man you shouldn't, and both are fascinated by how much a person will trade away to keep winning.

Working from an Aaron Sorkin script, Fincher makes a deposition play like a heist. The film tracks the early days of Facebook and the friendships it strained, scored by a jittery Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack that keeps the room cold.

The Zuckerberg here is the boardroom cousin of Lou Bloom, a young man who out-works and out-freezes the people around him, then looks hurt when they flinch. Both movies pick at the founder myth and ask what it costs whoever happens to be standing next to the guy running the seminar.

Fincher's version of Gillian Flynn's novel is a marriage story wearing a missing-person case, and the less you know walking in, the better. It's cold and exact, and it has a mean sense of humour about how a story gets packaged for a camera.

Here's Nightcrawler's media half. Where Lou arranges crime scenes for the news, Gone Girl is obsessed with how people arrange themselves, feeding the cameras a version that sells. Both films treat the news cycle as a hungry animal and the truth as whatever makes it through the edit.

Aronofsky films ballet like body horror. Natalie Portman's Nina lands the lead in Swan Lake and pushes herself toward a perfection that keeps receding, until you stop trusting what she, and you, are seeing.

The link to Nightcrawler is ambition as an illness. Nina lets the drive hollow out everything else in her, the way Lou does, and like him she loses any sense of how she looks from the outside. Both films watch a person vanish into the thing they want, and neither looks away.

Tom Ford, the designer turned director, splits the film in two, a chilly Los Angeles art world and the vicious Texas revenge novel one character is reading. The halves keep answering each other in ways that sting.

It shares Nightcrawler's glassy surface and its streak of cruelty under the gloss. Both use LA's polished emptiness to frame people who have gone quietly numb, and both care more about the harm a controlled man can do than about any loud villain. A good note to end on.