Nightmare Alley (2021)

This is a dark and stormy movie, with everything you would expect from Guillermo del Toro. And it is aptly named as well. The story ultimately conculdes that what comes around goes around, but the devil is in the details. The story is about grifters, how they operate, who they take advantage of and what becomes of them. It comes as no surprise that Cate Blanchett pulls that role off seamlessly--the authenticity that she brings to every role she takes on is exceptional. The story does not revolve around her but rather Bradley Cooper's smart, traumatized and deeply flawed character of Stan. Before utters his first line of dialogue the viewer has already seen him mercilessly drag a corpse and set a house on fire. He is in almost every sense but the legal one a fugitive, from his past and his own unresolved resentment, a man who lands at a 1930s traveling sideshow populated with curious acts of benign mentalism and bizarre cautionary tales. He woos and wheedles his way into a high class charlatan and thus begins his downfall. Equal parts painful and believable, a memorable character in a familiar story that ends almost exactly where it begins.