Bad dream couture: How noir ‘Nightmare Alley’ got its carnival look

Guillermo del Toro has been directing movies since 1986 with his first short film Doña Lupe. Many were familiar with his horror films in the 1990s but it wasn’t until 2006 Pan’s Labyrinth that made him a household name. 

Since his 1993 debut “Cronos,” it’s always been explicit that Guillermo del Toro is a genre filmmaker at heart. Over the years, the director has tackled several different kinds of horror films.

Lady Gaga can’t recommend Bradley Cooper‘s new movie enough.

NEW YORK -- With a touch of Barbara Stanwyck, a sumptuous Art Deco office and a deadly shade of crimson lipstick, Cate Blanchett plays a femme fatale in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” with cunning embrace and subversion of the film noir archetype.If “Nightmare Alley” is del Toro’s lushly composed love letter to noir, the movie’s pulpy heart is in Blanchett’s conniving psychiatrist Lilith Ritter.

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“Nightmare Alley” is an adaptation of the William Lindsey Gresham novel of the same name, and finds del Toro working without supernatural elements for the first time in his career. Production initially began in January 2020, but COVID shut down filming in March.

After the release of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Leonardo DiCaprio was reportedly offered quite a few films. Obviously.

Guillermo del Toro’s remake of the 1947 thriller Nightmare Alley is going full noir next month. Searchlight Pictures said today that a black-and-white version of the new pic starring Bradley Cooper will get a limited theatrical release in Los Angeles.

Guillermo Del Toro is not as prolific as some of his peers when it comes to feature films, but it’s still somewhat surprising it’s taken this long for him to work with Cate Blanchett. They both had their breakthrough moments in the mid-to-late-1990s and Blanchett could have easily stepped into the worlds of any “Hellboy” movie, “The Shape of Water,” or “Crimson Peak” without a second glance.

“Nightmare Alley,” Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name (made once before in 1947 by British filmmaker Edmund Goulding) wasn’t exactly the smoothest.

The Shape of Water,” he won the Best Picture Oscar.His latest, “Nightmare Alley,” probably won’t, but it is nonetheless a far more entertaining and satisfying film than its overrated science-fiction predecessor. The sinister carnival sideshow look is alluring, a perfect match for subversive del Toro.

“Nightmare Alley” (opening Friday) stars Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett, and takes place in the seedy traveling carnivals of the 1940s. And no matter how different these movies are, they share one thing in common: they are all tall.

A title like “ Nightmare Alley,” especially when paired with a filmmaker like Guillermo del Toro, suggests a certain kind of movie. Del Toro, the director of “The Shape of Water” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” has a signature style after all.But “Nightmare Alley” is not about a haunted house or the supernatural.

Don’t Look Up.Discussing the scene, the film’s director Adam McKay claimed that DiCaprio “had a problem” because he “views Meryl as film royalty”.Streep plays President Janie Orlean in the film, which also stars Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Lawrence, Mark Rylance, Timothée Chalamet and more.“She is fearless,” McKay told The Guardian of Streep. “And yes, that is a body double.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticHumans are stupid and can’t be expected to agree on anything, even if their existence depends on it.

“If you displease the right people, the world closes in on you very, very fast,” Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) cautions her new partner in crime, mentalist Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper).

The end is here. No, we’re not at the end of Oscar season, but we are effectively at the finish line for Oscar contenders to reveal themselves.