| Searchlight Pictures | Release Date: December 17, 2021 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
38
Mixed:
17
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jan 23, 2022RogerEbert.comDec 17, 2021
Dec 13, 2021
Dec 16, 2021
It’s a film noir in much the same way that “Crimson Peak” was a horror movie: Feverishly and often magnificently overwrought, it treats its genre less as a template to be followed than a lavish funhouse in which to run amok. Its characters, tropes and archetypes, convincing enough on their own, take on even richer dimensions when placed alongside their antecedents.
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Dec 14, 2021
It’s a noir tale for contemporary audiences who have developed an appetite for sensation from comic book movies, not literature. The film doesn’t need all that spectacle, and it is at its best when it is at its simplest, relying on the power of storytelling and vivid language, not gory effects.
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Dec 14, 2021
Even though there are a bunch of interesting personalities (like Ron Perlman’s strongman Bruno), Nightmare Alley lacks the human connections that not only made del Toro’s last effort, best picture winner The Shape of Water, so entrancing but also populate the 1947 adaptation of Gresham’s book.
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IndieWireDec 1, 2021
This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the darkest margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for even the most damnable creatures he finds there sparks new life into “Nightmare Alley” as it narrows towards its inevitable dead end.
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Dec 16, 2021
Visually opulent as only a Guillermo del Toro movie can be with gorgeously detailed, period-perfect costumes and interiors and a marquee cast, the noir thriller Nightmare Alley checks all the grand boxes of the genre. Yet the film feels emotionally inert, stacked with unsympathetic, strangely uncharismatic characters that defy empathy. Or worse: defy abiding interest.
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Dec 3, 2021
Film noir is a cynical genre, and the script makes gestures toward establishing that these characters live in a cold world where nothing matters but the almighty dollar. But del Toro is a romantic at heart, and can’t help swooning where the subtext wants to spit. His sensibility isn’t a bad thing. It just works better when the monsters aren’t human.
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Dec 15, 2021
Nightmare Alley doesn’t lack for action. It’s just that the action feels mechanical, a going through the motions. It’s a sincere going through the motions. It’s a committed going through the motions. But it’s still a going through the motions. Worse than a dream that’s a nightmare is a dream that’s a form of sleepwalking.
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Dec 21, 2021
What happens when you haul all the trappings of a genre rooted in post-war cynicism and lay them out raw for modern-day moviegoers? You end up with something like Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, a heady, fleeting pleasure that prioritises craft over moral complexity, with themes of class friction and fraudulent spirituality that would once have landed like haymakers packing much less punch today.
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The GuardianDec 9, 2021
It’s [Del Toro’s] most strikingly beautiful film yet, a velvety, precisely styled noir with the year’s most impressively stacked cast (two Oscar winners and six nominees, all bringing their A game) but its sleek shell is sadly as duplicitous as its untrustworthy conman protagonist, blinding us with dazzle but leaving us tricked.
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Dec 20, 2021
The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort.
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Dec 20, 2021
The film’s overbearing effort to say something serious about society at large seems to force del Toro’s directorial hand. It pushes him to up the razzle-dazzle in order to keep the didactic element entertaining. The result is a movie that is bloated in length, literal in its messaging, and overdecorated, like a cinematic Christmas tree, with dutiful dramatics that leach it of tension, energy, and spontaneity.
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Dec 16, 2021
Del Toro is a world builder, but he can have a tough time bringing his creations to life, which is the case here despite the hard work of his fine cast. The carnival is diverting, and del Toro’s fondness for its denizens helps put a human face on these purported freaks. But once he’s finished with the preliminaries, he struggles to make the many striking parts cohere into a living, breathing whole.
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The PlaylistDec 2, 2021
Bloated at nearly 140 minutes with Cooper clearly miscast in the lead, it struggles to maintain urgency. Dreary and overly saturated with a CGI patina, this new take on Nightmare Alley adds more gore and f-bombs to the source material but ultimately remains emotionally inert and unclear exactly what it wants to say about these characters and the world they inhabit.
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