Female Film Critics 24/375
Nightmare Alley is the remake of a 1947 noir thriller that starred that swashbuckling heartthrob, Tyrone Power. Bradley Cooper steps into the role trying his best to be wickedly suave as a carny with a murderous past who learns the tricks of the traveling sideshow trade to swindle the rich as a manipulating mind reader. He’s a high plains drifter grifter.
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A remake of director Edmund Goulding’s shattering and, at the time, shockingly macabre 1947 noir Nightmare Alley may not seem the least bit necessary. But the imaginative Guillermo del Toro, with a screenplay by him and Kim Morgan, proves that this grim story still delivers a powerful experience and a weighty warning in his compelling, superbly cinematic reinterpretation.
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Anyone who saw director Chloé Zhao’s impressive film, The Rider, expects her imprint to embellish, her choices to be signatory. Zhao’s screenplay, although based on Jessica Bruder’s eye-opening exposé about the lives of older, rootless workers, skews Bruder’s emphasis to Zhao’s. Like The Rider, Nomadland amalgamates documentary with narrative forms of film.
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