Jake Gyllenhaal in "Source Code", one of his best roles since "Zodiac"

Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith in "Zodiac" (2007)

"Jake Gyllenhaal stars -- in his best role since Zodiac -- as Captain Colter Stevens. He begins the movie by suddenly waking up on a train. The last thing he remembers, he was flying a helicopter in the Middle East. What's even weirder is that the girl across the seat from him, Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) seems to know him and keeps calling him "Sean". Source: www.combustiblecelluloid.com

"Jake Gyllenhaal looks every bit the part of the earnest, young Captain Colter Stevens who recently completed the final mission of his career in Afghanistan, the reason for which is progressively revealed during the course of the film. However, his most earnest desire is to connect with his father to patch up a rift created by an argument before he left for Afghanistan. The promise to assist him in contacting his father is the carrot that Goodwin uses to keep Stevens motivated, and Gyllenhall’s performance is especially affecting during these scenes". Source: blog.filmdilettante.com

Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal play Christina and Colter Stevens in "Source Code" (2011), directed by Duncan Jones

"Source Code connects effectively with the disorientation of a soldier who doesn't know where he is or even who he is, much less what his mission is supposed to be. Played by the puppy-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal, the last thing he remembers is flying a helicopter in Afghanistan; now he's on a commuter train to Chicago, sitting across from a friend he doesn't know and eight minutes away from being blown to smithereens. Working from Ben Ripley's script, Jones slowly brings the details of Gyllenhaal's situation into focus. Though his real name is Capt. Colter Stevens, Gyllenhaal spends the eight minutes on the train wired into the conscience of one of the bombing victims. The victim's confused friend is Christina, played by the ebullient Michelle Monaghan, and the woman on the monitor is Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), who acts as Colter's guide through his extraordinarily stressful ordeal. He's a man with a chance to save lives by identifying a terrorist before he kills again. But he is still stuck on a loop, no matter how hard he himself tries to live past his allotted time.
Forced to relive that harrowing eight minutes over and over in the search for bomb and bomber, Stevens falls in love with Christina (Michelle Monaghan), a passenger who dies each time in the explosion.
The more confusing Source Code remains, the better it is. Jones and Ripley align the audience closely with their hero, withholding revelations until he discovers them himself. His trauma has the greatest possible impact that way: Not only is this man doomed to relive the same patch of time over and over again, but every eight-minute cycle ends with an explosion that kills every passenger — and that he can't stop". Source: www.npr.org