WATCH PARTY: Nightmare Alley (2021) Guillermo del Toro @ Richard Tucker Library
Details
Not a Guillermo del Toro movie I've seen. We'll be in the meeting room to the left of the entrance with the large screen. (h/t cinephile Ren)
RUNTIME: 150 minutes
RATING: R
SYNOPSIS: In the 1940s New York, down-on-his-luck Stanton Carlisle endears himself to a clairvoyant and her mentalist husband at a traveling carnival. Using newly acquired knowledge, Carlisle crafts a golden ticket to success by swindling the elite and wealthy. Hoping for a big score, he soon hatches a scheme to con a dangerous tycoon with help from a mysterious psychologist who might be his most formidable opponent yet.
BLURBS:
"It's hard to think of a noir story that would be better suited to del Toro as a director -- the arch-fabulist who fears men more than he does monsters.." - Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent (UK)
"The genuine, pleasant surprise for me was discovering truly what an unabashed, all-out noir it was. Blanchett's character, the big scheme, the hubris and pushing the scheme too far, the fatalism." - Adam Kempanaar, Filmspotting
"From its bruised colour palette to its spiralling descent into madness and degradation, this is deliciously damnable fare, looking back through the prism of Del Toro's adventurous oeuvre to the existential angst of his vampiric feature debut, Cronos." - Mark Kermode, The Observer (UK)