Life, new Jake Gyllenhaal film

This is what makes Jake Gyllenhaal so compelling: no matter how sexy and gym-buffed he gets, he's still got that haunted dark-eyed quality he had in Donnie Darko. Sometimes he just looks melancholy or entranced, like in Brokeback Mountain or Jarhead, but in films like Nightcrawler and the brilliant Nocturnal Animals his big wet eyes have the gleam of true lunacy.


His quiet spookiness should be a good fit for the upcoming movie Life, a claustrophobic space-horror that follows the fate of the first astronauts to come across alien life. It's probably too early to tell (and the trailer doesn't give away much), but it'll probably be more Andromeda Strain than Alien, although the atmosphere is distinctly Ridley Scott-esque.

Ryan Reynolds is also in it. He'll probably say something sarcastic and die.