Female Film Critics 24/375
After a brief release in theaters, Nicolas Cage’s newest action-comedy The Retirement Plan is now streaming. The story begins in Miami with a heist that goes terribly wrong. As a result, Jimmy (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) and his wife Ashley (Ashley Greene) are in possession of an incriminating flash-drive that mobster, Donnie (Jackie Earle Haley) promised to give Hector (Grace Byrne), who heads an organized crime syndicate.
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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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Filmmaker John Swab clearly has literary aspirations for the film, with references to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and S.E. Hinton’s Rumble Fish, and the writer-director has some interesting ideas about childhood innocence, trauma and struggles to understand the adult world.
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