Film: Del Toro creates another dark world of his own

Nightmare Alley is a nicely spooky neo-noir from the Mexican master

Cate Blanchett and Bradley Cooper in Nightmare Alley. Director Guillermo del Toro turns a story about conniving hustlers and gullible marks into something stealthier. Picture: Kerry Hayes

Nightmare Alley

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Nationwide, 16

Rating: ****

Mass

Directed by Fran Kranz

IFI, no cert

Rating: ***

“Never do a spook show,” someone warns early on in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Nightmare Alley, set among the haves and the have-nots at the tail end of the Great Depression. “No good comes out of a spook show.”

William Lindsay Gresham’s cult 1946 novel was first filmed by British journeyman Edmund Goulding ...