Over the past thirty years, Guillermo del Toro has directed some of the most haunting movies: "Cronos", "Mimic", "The Devil's Backbone", "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Shape of Water". He now adds "Nightmare Alley", a disturbing look at a man's overconfidence.

Bradley Cooper plays a man who joins a traveling carnival but begins letting his belief in his own abilities get the better of him, especially after he starts associating with a morally ambiguous psychologist. Cate Blanchett's performance as the psychologist is what makes the movie, in my opinion. That and the production design create one of the most mind-blowing things that you'll ever see; it certainly earned its Academy Award nomination for production design.

I don't know if I would call this the year's best movie, but it's one of the most impressive. Along with Cooper and Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, David Strathairn, Mary Steenburgen, Ron Perlman, Richard Jenkins and a host of other people put on splendid performances. You should definitely check this movie out.

While visually captivating, the storyline left much to be desired. The characters were well acted but lacked depth. The story was anticlimactic and at no point made any sense. Forgettable.

I liked Nightmare Alley at first. It's visually gorgeous and pulls you in with its ambience and bits of mystery. But at a certain point, where what I'd call the "second act" begins, I looked to see how much was left of the movie, thinking it was about the time in a noir when things really get going like a runaway freight train, and realized it was only half over!

I felt pretty restless at that point, in spite of Cate Blanchett's pitch-perfect performance. It wasn't so much that less time should have been used up in the first act as that every single thing should have been shorter. This should have had the brisk quality of classic noir, instead of the slow boil noir here.

The movie does finally go into runaway freight train mode almost two hours in, and that last part is intense and gripping and everything you'd want it to be, but really this whole movie should have been 90-100 minutes and a good finale doesn't erase the boredom I'd felt for most of the previous hour.

Del Toro's a terrific director, the movie looks amazing, and Blanchett is phenomenal, so I won't say skip it. I will say, lower your expectations and don't count on something worthy of the best picture Oscar nomination this got.