Nightmare Alley had every opportunity to improve on the original film by portraying carnivals as the diverse places they are, with people from all walks of life. They didn’t.

| Original Score: D | Feb 14, 2025

Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette and Willem Dafoe all star in this cleverly crafted and very dark 1940s-set psychological thriller.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 17, 2025

Playing out at the intersection of Uri Geller and Jim Thompson, "Nightmare Alley" is a dread-laden tale of broken souls and battered dreams against a dust-choked backdrop. A fascinating bit of fatalism from Guillermo del Toro.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 25, 2024

A lot of directors love to make period pieces, but the movies feel staged, and the actors feel too modern whereas “Nightmare Alley” feels as if del Toro went back in time and shot the movie.

| Jun 9, 2024

In addition to its thrilling plot and studded cast, Nightmare Alley is also psychologically literate enough to make a carnival out of the human soul.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Oct 29, 2023

Nightmare Alley is something to behold... but it's the storytelling that lacks conviction.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 27, 2023

Del Toro’s strongest thematically made film. With a twisted atmosphere that had me in awe at every turn. Incredibly made, slow first chapter but once it got going I was all in.

| Jul 26, 2023

Few directors can match Guillermo del Toro‘s virtuosity. There’s a Kafkaesque yet sensual opulence to his dark sensibilities.

| Jul 25, 2023

It’s disappointing to see a movie like this that’s interesting enough to keep viewers hanging on, hoping the next scene is going to turn it all around, but it never does. It’s a spook show–telling the audience lies and letting them believe there’s hope.

| Jul 25, 2023

If the original Nightmare Alley is a film about Stan’s transformation, del Toro’s 2021 version is more about revelation, the layers of falsehood in Stan and his world being stripped away until the monstrous reality is laid bare.

| Jun 6, 2023

It looks exquisite, it makes you think, it challenges your convictions. Everything that intelligent and engaging cinema should offer us. Just don't fall for Stan's tricks.

| Original Score: 8.5/10 | Dec 30, 2022

A haunting game of drifters, grifters, con men and women that never fail to entertain their audience.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 21, 2022

NIGHTMARE ALLEY is described by its makers as a new adaptation of the book by William Lindsay Gresham, not a remake of the 1947 classic film noir version, and everything about this new production is top-notch.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 18, 2022

Nightmare Alley is another engrossing genre exercise from Guillermo del Toro, enhanced by captivating crafts and the brilliant Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Del Toro and Morgan's script possesses visual and symbolic violence, highlighting the questionable nature of both the character and humanity. However, towards the end, the action gets clumsy, and the duration doesn't help... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 22, 2022

Here, monsters are human, the supernatural is a fraud and we make our own hell. Too dark for the complacent current standards of Hollywood, Nightmare Alley won't win as many awards as The Shape of Water (2017). [Full review in Spanish]

| Aug 8, 2022

Like getting lost in its funhouse sideshows, jewel-hued costumes and the velvety art-deco furnishings of life after the road, this endlessly mesmerising movie is always sordid yet immaculate as well, and creepy yet slinky and pulpy yet ravishing.

| Jun 25, 2022

When a movie opens with a good old fashioned body disposal, fire, and a celebration afterwards at a traveling carnival, I know I am watching the right film.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 22, 2022

A violent, dark and borderline existentialist noir... [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 21, 2022

Clad with cinema styles of yonder, [the film] builds discomfort and accumulates hypnotic images, but for some strange reason I can't get behind its crooked, perverse characters. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 9, 2022