Nope

Jordan Peele has once again proven that he's an intriguing director, just like he did with Get Out. In Nope, he delves into themes that no one else has touched, blending a unique black perspective with mysticism, aliens, and a Western vibe. Sounds like a mess? Just watch Nope. It might seem crazy, and it is, but it's an atmospherically genius kind of crazy, with stunning cinematography. I haven't been so captivated by shots of clouds in a long time. The film is filled with more WTF moments than you can imagine, and its ending is fantastic — though it does dip into a Hollywood vibe just when you think it's entirely anti-Hollywood. For those moments and the riveting conclusion, this movie truly deserves your attention. I haven't watched TV with such interest and curiosity in a long time. (05/24/2024)

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)

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)

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)

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)