Nightmare Alley (2021)

Visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley smolders with performances from its prinicpal players -- Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett -- that will likely remind movie geeks of the noir classics of the '40s. (In fact, an earlier version of this story was produced in 1947, starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell.) Matched with Del Toro's exquisite eye for period detail and atmosphere, the film is as captivating as the con artists at its center. Cooper plays a drifter turned carnival roustie turned "mentalist" who takes the act he's mastered from Zeena and the Professor (Toni Collette and David Strathairn) on the road with the help of Molly (Rooney Mara), the girl who conducts electricity. The two eventually team up with an unsavory but immaculately scultured psychologist (Blanchett channelling Bacall) who helps Cooper's Carlisle find well-heeled marks to scam. As suggested by its title, Nightmare Alley is dark and foreboding, a Del Toro trademark, and its characters are pitiful when they're not depicable. But it's beautfiully constructed -- Blanchett's scarlet lips are a work of art -- and speaks to human ferality, its power to elude and seduce.