The material... is unusual and the cast first-rate.

| Jul 6, 2022

If Nightmare Alley isn't precisely tasty entertainment, at least it has been colorfully and harshly set forth with better than average character sketches lending it a certain unsavory interest and morbid fascination.

| Dec 7, 2021

All together the film has a great deal of accumulative impact. It is a thoroughly unpleasant, but salutary picture. It should pull both potential dupes and the potentially ruthless up good and short.

| Dec 7, 2021

The dialogue has plenty of punch, and the photography, especially in the tawdry tent world, is expert. If you like your movies rough and realistic, you'll find this one entertaining for the most part.

| Dec 7, 2021

Despite some fine and intense acting by Mr. Power and others, this film traverses distasteful dramatic ground and only rarely does it achieve any substance as entertainment.

| Dec 7, 2021

Edmund Goulding is a director who knows how to squeeze emotions out of players; and his production, repellent as its theme may be, develops considerable fascination up to the closing reel or so.

| Dec 7, 2021

The hero is a heel from beginning to end. He doesn't merit or get any sympathy from the audience, and the ending is merely depressing.

| Dec 7, 2021

As entertainment, Nightmare Alley is a sordid, spellbinding piece of screen fare suitable only for adults of the sturdy type. It is a gripping melodrama well produced, expertly directed and acted.

| Dec 7, 2021

Although Nightmare Alley has been given a substantial production background by 20th Century-Fox, excellent direction by Edmund Goulding and competent acting by its cast, the story of the charlatan is too unpleasant warrant a hearty endorsement.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 7, 2021

This dark and determinedly sleazy 1947 film comes as quite a surprise from its director -- Edmund Goulding, whose specialty through the 30s, in films like Grand Hotel and The Old Maid, was his inveterate tastefulness... A fascinating anomaly.

| Dec 7, 2021

Power is a little old for the part. It's hard to fight a wince every time someone refers to him as ''kid.'' But his performance is deft and real.

| Dec 6, 2021

To many film-goers Nightmare Alley will be too unpleasant in subject to please as entertainment. However, the acting is first rate, although the photography is too murky for a clear idea of what is going on.

| Dec 3, 2021

A padded film, running for nearly two hours, which means nothing, tells nothing and has no apparent objective.

| Dec 3, 2021

The story of a young mental-telepathist who unscrupulously sets out to achieve fame at all costs is told vividly through the performance of Tyrone Power, who shows unsuspected powers as a dramatic actor.

| Dec 3, 2021

Emerges on the screen as a study in realistic horror which might just as well be recorded now as one of the finest pictures of the year. Gripping, exciting and suspenseful, it is a grim, relentless account of a man's degeneration.

| Dec 2, 2021

Scripter Jules Furthman and Director Edmund Goulding have ... seldom forgotten that the original novel they were adapting is essentially intelligent trash; and they have never forgotten that on the screen pretty exciting things can be made of trash.

| Mar 2, 2018

Nightmare Alley is a harsh, brutal story told with the sharp clarity of an etching.

| Mar 26, 2009

Though perhaps it tries too hard to be 'respectable' and downplays its tawdry trash vulgarity a little too much, this is still a mean, moody, and well-nigh magnificent melodrama.

| Jan 26, 2006

A dark, rough and grubby -- but enjoyable nonetheless -- slice of doomsaying from the ascendent years of film noir.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2005

A strange and rather sick movie made by highly talented people.

| Feb 6, 2002