Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley

An ambitious carnival man with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychologist who is even more dangerous than he is.

  • Released: 2021-12-02
  • Runtime: 150 minutes
  • Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
  • Stars: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, David Strathairn, Holt McCallany, Mark Povinelli, Jim Beaver, Romina Power, Paul Anderson, Tim Blake Nelson, Mary Steenburgen, Clifton Collins Jr., Lara Jean Chorostecki, Drew Nelson, David Hewlett, Troy James, Samantha Rodes, Peter MacNeill, Sarah Mennell, Mike Hill, Caleb Ellsworth-Clark, Dian Bachar, Matthew MacCallum, Linden Porco, Jesse Buck, Stephen McHattie, Bill MacDonald, Natalie Brown, Perry Mucci, Dan Lett, Catherine McGregor, Martin Julien, Tim Post, Will Conlon, Daniel Falk, James Collins, Lili Connor, Danny Waugh, Walter Rinaldi, Andrew Locke, Calvin Desautels, Derrick Moore, Grant Bradley, Dani Klupsch, Vikki Ring, Vanessa Botbyl, Michael Bridgeman, Charles Langille, Paul Taylor, Clyde Whitham, Romina Power
  • Director: Guillermo del Toro
 Comments
  • skyguywv - 1 June 2024
    Beautifully done.
    I wont talk about the story because it's been portrayed here in detail. But I will say that the cinematic alone makes this film worth watching. You feel that you have been taken back to the 20s and 30s with every shot. The use of rain alone drives you further into the story. I cant recall the last time I saw a film that kept me in the time period like this one. It's a delight for the eyes from start to finish. The story? Wow! From beginning to end it keeps you wanting to see more. The actors are more than perfect and this film should have won several Oscars. If you like an engaging story and a beautifully shot time period piece, this is the film for you.
  • david-meldrum - 21 January 2024
    A Good Noir Thriller, But Falls Short Of Del Toro's Best
    With all the richness of horrific possibilities a carnival setting provides, this seems to be an odd choice of story to tell for del Toro, a director most at home with horror and fantasy/sci-fi genres. I haven't seen the 1940's original, but this version plays with the supernatural and flirts with horror, but is ultimately a character piece masquerading as a psychological thriller.

    Bradley Cooper is good as the central character, a man who exists whenever he can in liminal spaces - corridors, paths, travelling on a train when we first meet him, the travelling carnival and touring mentalist shows in which he spends most of the film. Every time deeper relationships peel of layers towards the core of who he is, he runs. Rooney Mara as his partner is miscast - she's a good actor, but this part and her are a mismatch, and it threatens to undermine the film. That it doesn't is largely down to the arrival of Cate Blanchett, whose scenes with Copper are electric, easily the highlights of the film. The film is stuffed with great actors in largely well-defined roles, but the screenplay does suffer from an episodic feel which at times undermine the plot's momentum; at times it lags a little, and the two and half hour run time feels baggy.

    As usual with del Toro the technical sides are beautiful - production design, lighting, cinematography, to name three. As a whole, however, it falls short of the director's best work.