Nope

Siblings OJ and Emerald are struggling with a failing farm, their own relationship, and now with something hiding in the clouds, and as it soon turns out, it's pretty damn dangerous. Only how do you expose this thing, which is good at hiding and doesn't like to let witnesses in, to the world? And how to survive it? Jordan Peele delivers a science fiction film that doesn't quite work in the first half, and he as a director doesn't quite manage to build the tension as well as he might have liked. But he makes up for it all with the final act, when the humans and the mysterious something from the clouds have a fair fight. The closer we get to the end, the smarter and more entertaining Nope gets. And it looks really beautiful. But Peele still can't do real fear and terror. (08/17/2022)

Playful, but without balls and a proper climax. Peele again pretends to amass all the wit in the world for a thrilling finale, but in sum, he just patiently teases and misses the mark. There were a lot of suggestions and I appreciate especially the reference to the history of motion picture and its representative or media function, but I enjoyed the more mysterious and yet more down-to-earth Signs much more. (12/08/2022)

For viewers who are aware of Peele’s filmmaking talent and screenwriting limitations, Nope is exactly the kind of nonsense indicated by the trailer. As a director, he can grippingly shoot practically any scene. But when those scenes only hint at something for a hundred minutes, and some of them (the Asian and the chimpanzee) have no meaningful relevance to the already thin story, it’s merely pretentious bullshitting. Peele’s unusual mixing of genre motifs (in this case, sci-fi horror and westerns) can come across as bold and original, but in a film that is supposed to be scary while balancing on the edge of parody, the creative vision gets lost. In terms of execution, Nope is somewhere between Get Out, which was based on a brilliant idea, and Us, which was ridiculous bullshit. (08/28/2022)

Excellent in terms of Peele's creative limits, and in terms of the current creative limits of the contemporary mainstream it’s one of the films of the year. Anyway, who am I kidding, the movie itself is divine. If, like me, you're lucky enough to have seen the film as a complete "tabula rasa", you're in for a magical hour and a half of gradually unraveling mysteries in Hollywood Hills, during which various scripted red herrings and plot contrivances scramble around you, hilariously referencing the magical idiocy of 1990s American TV that Tarantino, for example, was so fond of talking about. After all, after his last film, I think Peele is much closer to him than to the oft-cited Hitchcock. It works as a genre piece, but with even a minimum of knowledge of American pop culture it starts to become apparent how insanely great the whole film is. The charm of big horse eyes, Harambe, the haunted aura of Hollywood ranches, cameramen measuring guns, Wincott pulled out of somewhere by his collar, a soundtrack that steals from both Morricone and Badalamenti, and a cloud that doesn't move for six months without anyone noticing. And Hoytema behind the camera. Yep. (08/22/2022)

An amazing atmosphere and so many original ideas... I'm glad that they still make (and get into cinemas) films like this that are probably impossible to fully understand at first, but which have such charm that you want to watch them again and only fully understand them afterwards. Original plot, realistic story, great (and well acted) characters, a sense of constant mystery… It's not horror, because then Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which Peele combines with Jaws, Signs and more, would have to be horror. I haven't seen a more original design of an alien "something" since Arrival, a number of scenes are without exaggeration unforgettable and I look forward to seeing them again. I think Nope is in many ways on par with Christopher Nolan's films, and if Nolan or Dennis Villeneuve had made it instead of Peele, the ratings here would be quite different. (09/03/2022)