Blanchett, del Toro on the femme fatale of ‘Nightmare Alley’

By JAKE COYLE
AP Film Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — With a touch of Barbara Stanwyck, a sumptuous Art Deco office and a deadly shade of crimson lipstick, Cate Blanchett plays a femme fatale in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” with cunning embrace and subversion of the film noir archetype. If “Nightmare Alley” is del Toro’s lushly composed love letter to noir, the movie’s heart is in Blanchett’s conniving psychiatrist Lilith Ritter. She doesn’t enter the film until halfway through, when Bradley Cooper’s carnival huckster, Stan, catches her eye in his nightclub mind-reading act, and the two hatch a scheme together. But when she does turn up, Blanchett shifts the film’s fable-like frequency, conjuring deeper shades of black from the movie’s rich tapestry of shadow and fate.