Given director Guillermo del Toro’s catalogue of ornate gothic horror movies, it seems a film about a carnival freak show would be a career imperative. His latest movie, the confrontingly dark and creepy noir crime thriller, Nightmare Alley – which is a remake of the Edmund Goulding 1947 film – explores this unsettling and often sad world. Bradley Cooper stars
Read moreGuillermo del Toro is renowned for ornate gothic horror films in which sinewy monsters, representing the threat to the average person of political oppression and other ills, emerge from the perceived safety of the family home. His latest film Crimson Peak adopts a similar approach and delivers much of the mystery, the sense of unease and visual artistry of his
Read moreOnly if you mated a Great Dane with a Blue Whale could you create a bigger dog than Pacific Rim. What could have been an exciting high-tech twist on global apocalypse films and old-school, Japanese-style monster movies turns out to be a moronic, clichéd, emotionally empty dud. Not only is this film dumb, devoid of tension and visually incoherent, it
Read moreThe first two thirds of horror film Mama are so creepy and stylishly shot it’s a tragedy that the film succumbs to cliché and implausibility in its latter stages. This is yet another film with the production imprimatur of Guillermo del Toro and anyone who has seen previous films he has produced will know that this means spooky children communing
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