Nightmare Alley
film roundup
Nightmare Alley (Dir. Guillermo del Toro). Starring: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara. This remake of the 1947 Tyrone Power-starring noir set in the world of carnies and con artists is clearly a labor of love for cowriter-director Guillermo del Toro. Bradley Cooper plays Stanton Carlisle, a down-and-out drifter who learns the duplicitous methods of being a medium while hunkering down at a traveling sideshow. He falls for the sweet-natured Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara), then runs off with her to the big city where they reinvent themselves as high-society psychics. Eventually they catch the attention of the manipulative psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who plots with Stanton to fleece millionaire Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins) out of a small fortune. But who is the joke really on? Del Toro has a good grip on the oppressive, tragedy-suffused mood of the piece and he revels in the eye-catchingly detailed production design of Tamara Deverell. Yet there’s some crucial bit of soul missing that makes this feel, in its way, like one of the P.T. Barnum-esque hustles it’s attempting to deconstruct. [R] HHH 10
ICON | JANUARY 2022 | ICONDV.COM
West Side Story (Dir. Steven Spielberg). Starring: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose. Several of the most thrilling sequences in the films of Steven Spielberg have been musical—think of the Busby Berkeley-esque opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or the transcendent juke-joint-to-church climax of The Color Purple. So it’s a delight to see him tackle a full-on song and dance movie, and of a truly storied property, at that. You know the basics: Two rival gangs, the white Jets vs. the Puerto Rican Sharks. A forbidden love story, riffing on Romeo and Juliet, between Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler). Music by Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. All that plus a muchawarded, as well as divisive, 1961 movie adaptation by Robert Wise. Spielberg makes this version his own from frame one, with the pointed thematic help of screenwriter Tony Kushner (who sets the story against the backdrop of gentrifying 1957 NYC) and the visual aid of his great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, whose camera whirls among the performers (Mike Faist’s Riff and Ariana DeBose’s Anita are MVPs) with its own dancer’s dexterity. [PG-13] HHHH1/2
KEITH UHLICH
France (Dir. Bruno Dumont). Starring: Léa Seydoux, Blanche Gardin, Benjamin Biolay. Down a shot every time Léa Seydoux weeps in Bruno Dumont’s France and you’ll be plastered within a half-hour. Though France de Meurs, the ambitious and fashionable reporter who Seydoux plays, is initially a steelier sort, tossing barbs at President Emmanuel Macron (via a clever integration of real-life archive footage into Dumont’s heightened fictional context) and smugly hosting an evening newshour that, in its various topical hysterias, wouldn’t be out of place on Fox. A chance accident with a young immigrant opens some new emotional reserves, though it would be simplistic to say they’re entirely compassionate ones. Empathy is just as ruthless a means to an end, and if you’re familiar with Dumont’s cinema, you know that his characters aren’t exactly the repentant sort. What they are, instead, are icons of ambiguity, their true motives cloaked, like France (character and country), by something provocatively inscrutable. [N/R] HHH1/2 The Matrix Resurrections (Dir. Lana Wachowski). Starring: Keanu Reeves, CarrieAnne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Don’t call it a reboot, it’s been here for years. The Matrix, that is—that virtual penal colony (the subject of a series of big-budget spectaculars made between 1999 and 2003) that uses humanity as an unwitting energy source for sentient machines. This exceedingly fun and achingly romantic fourth installment initially goes the meta route of films like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, positing the story of sacrificial savior Neo (Keanu Reeves) and his immortal beloved Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) as a real-world work of art that has had a profound effect on society. In truth, it’s all just another version of the Matrix itself, a prison for Neo and Trinity, whose deaths in the third film are rendered moot, though the unfairness and cruelty of their “resurrections” resonate profoundly throughout as they both work hard to be reunited. This is a splashy film of serpentine ideas and earnest emotions, though director Lana Wachowski makes it much easier to embrace than to ridicule. [R] HHHH n
