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They have now added that the new cut of the film runs 159m to the film’s page.

This didn't do anything for me, but I've said enough negative things about movies named Nightmare Alley today, so I'm just going to talk more descriptively about what I thought the movie was doing.

Unsurprisingly, del Toro takes the 'nightmare' part of the title more literally than the first film. So the carnival seems to materialize out of nowhere like in a dream, and it's suffused with a gothic, romantic feeling not dissimilar to Tim Burton. No matter how shabby or seedy the carnival, a sheen of magic lingers over it. And the urban sections are a self-conscious pastiche of old Hollywood glamour (especially Blanchett with all her artful poses out of a magazine). So the reality of the film doesn't feel grounded or especially convincing as a social milieu, despite the period costuming and occasional historical references. By leaning into the artificial, del Toro risks making the film feel simply phony, but I think what ends up happening is the film feels like a folktale. Giving the movie the rhythms of a folktale is a canny choice, both because the story's structure is already circular like a folktale, and the moralism at the heart of the story is conventional to the form. So del Toro avoids the stolid, judgemental moralisms of the first movie pretty well, actually. Noir is itself a form of dark urban fantasy, so despite the acidity of the material, noir dovetails well with del Toro's instinct for the gothic and the fantastical. And noir characters like the femme fatale fit perfectly with del Toro's feeling that it's the conventional, respectable people who are the real monsters.

I think del Toro's instincts here are often right. I just wish I liked the movie more. The trouble is, like the first movie, there's little reason to invest in the story or characters. In the first it was a judgemental remove that got in the way, here it's superficiality. By giving the movie itself the sheen of fakery and manipulation, the sheen of cinema itself, you're also kept at a remove. And here I said I wasn't going to say anything negative.

I still think this could have been at least a half-interesting film had DiCaprio stayed on, because he would have become invested in the character and -as the hyper-involved actor he is- likely found some way around the problems here. Or maybe he passed on it ultimately because there didn't seem a way around the more fundamental issues. Either way, he's of better use in better projects

I stayed away from this until last year as haven't been the biggest del Toro fan and thought that, similar to Crimson Peak, it would drown its overqualified cast in excessive art direction. But this was surprisingly great and an improvement over the 1947 movie, which lacks bite due to being a big studio movie of its time with all the limitations that entailed.

The cast are pitch perfect and the film is a gorgeous period piece without going overboard. I'll rewatch it soon and maybe add more thoughts, but with this, his stop-motion Pinocchio and the promising looking Frankenstein, it looks like del Toro maybe better at adapting novels than comic books or originating projects.

I was just thinking that the worst thing in the movie (and this might be true of the book as well) is the story of how you get a geek. It's such vile exploitation it amounts to human trafficking. After that, it's hard to get worked up over awful people conning each other. Willem Defoe's barker is a more callous, evil person than anyone else in the thing, and he's just a side character. This is where the first film's reticence might've worked in its favour. You learn just enough to think the geek is a horrible fate without the geek's story overshadowing everything else.

That said, I'd love to read William Lindsay Gresham's nonfiction book about carnivals and fairs. Sounds fascinating. Hopefully NYRB Classics or some other reprint house rescues it.