Nightmare Alley (2021) review

After burying a body and the burning the house down around it, Stan (Bradley Cooper) takes a job as a "carny" at the local circus, learning "tricks of the trade" from the likes of geek-wrangler Clem (Willem Dafoe) and drunkard Pete (David Strathairn) before setting off independently with his girlfriend Molly (Rooney Mara) to perform the "forbidden mentalist act" which he was warned against doing umpteen times.  Del Toro is taking what's essentially a pulpy and raw text and trying to polish it up to being an arthouse movie and it doesn't work: he's too into fantastic comic book type worlds and glossy gadgets to make an authentic movie about madness and the last "grift" that Stan tries pulling on the powerful (and tormented) Ezra Griddle (Richard Jenkins) is not only overcomplicated, but totally hokey.  They claim it's a "re-adaptation" of the novel by William Lindsay Gresham to try to avoid comparisons to the 1947 movie with Tyrone Power, but the Goulding picture still feels considerably more real and alive.