Nope

For two thirds the film is a compelling, engrossing and carefully constructed horror-thriller mystery that kept me engaged as the characters struggled to get to the bottom of the mystery. This part of Nope, which I was very pleased with, culminated in a magnificent night scene with "blood rain" that made me glow with bliss and consider awarding five star to a horror flick for the first time in a long time. But, as you can see, I didn’t go further than three. Because the film then turns into an action charade, where you don't care about the characters and just try to catch the design of the weird contraption and figure out if you like it or not. And what shocked me above all is that it doesn't actually come to anything. After his previous two films, you'd expect Jordan Peele to be ... smarter than that? Us may have been logically leaky, but I found its social references were very stimulating (and that goes twofold  for Get Out). There's nothing like that in Nope, or I don't see it there at first. Many people, often dismissively, refer to Peele as the king of "elevated horror", but this is, in the end, more or less an ordinary genre film. In the space of half an hour, the film shoots two or three banal ideas (what people are willing to risk for fame and success / the fascination with tragedy / the stupid notion that man can tame everything), which it then repeats to the point of foolishness, but doesn't take them anywhere. I don't want to sound overly critical, Nope is definitely nice to look at, it has a number of impressive scenes and it's certainly a good film to see in the cinema, but after the excellent first two acts I can't help feeling disappointed at the end. (08/17/2022)

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)

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)

OK, so this sci-fi horror movie has a nice, solid atmosphere, carefully building tension. The monster is only hinted at most of the time, it is only revealed at the end and the artwork on it is pretty good. The high-quality, but not well-known actors are a joy to watch. The flashbacks affording glimpses into the past, leading back to one similar incident, were carefully rationed, appearing at just the right times, giving away only what was absolutely essential. So the viewer is clear about what happened back then, and is just left wondering how much will be revealed in the next flashback. I give a big plus point for the fact that there is no love interest in the film. _____ However, I was annoyed by the music, as well as the hero's whiny, selfish sister, and I got a bit bored at times during some of the waiting. IN A NUTSHELL: Sentence: "He must be watching us from the cloud...," may have a completely different meaning than you think. (02/23/2023)