way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability; there is no instinct for self-preservation here, and that is one mark of a good actor." The film was released in April 2000, becoming a commercial and critical success and later developing a cult following; the role established Bale as a leading man. In the four years that followed American Psycho, Bale's career experienced critical and commercial failure. He next played a villainous real estate heir in John Singleton's action film Shaft and appeared in John Madden's film adaptation of the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin as Mandras, a Greek fisherman who vies with Nicolas Cage's title character for the affections of Pelagia, played by Penélope Cruz. Bale said he found it refreshing to play Mandras, who is emotionally humane, after working on American Psycho and Shaft. In 2002, he appeared in three films: Laurel Canyon, Reign of Fire and Equilibrium. Reviewing Laurel Canyon for Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum called Bale's performance "fussy". After having reservations about joining the post-apocalyptic Reign of Fire, which involved computer-generated imagery, Bale professed his enjoyment of making films that could go awry and cited director Rob Bowman as a reason for his involvement. In Equilibrium, he plays a police officer in a futuristic society and performs gun kata, a fictional martial art that incorporates gunfighting. IGNs Jeff Otto characterised Reign of Fire as "poorly received" and Equilibrium as "highly underrated", while The Independents Stephen Applebaum described the two films along with Shaft and Captain Corelli's Mandolin as "mediocre fare". Bale starred as the insomnia-ridden, emotionally dysfunctional title character in the psychological thriller The Machinist. To prepare for the role, he initially only smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey. His diet later expanded to include black coffee, an apple and a can of tuna per day. Bale lost , weighing to play the character, who was written in the script as "a walking skeleton". His weight loss prompted comparisons with Robert De Niro's weight gain in preparation to play Jake LaMotta in the 1980 film Raging Bull. Describing his transformation as mentally calming, Bale claimed he had stopped working for a while because he did not come upon scripts that piqued his interest and that the film's script drew him to lose weight for the part. The Machinist was released in October 2004; it performed poorly at the box office. Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel regarded