Review of Nope (2022)
Seen in 2025.
Siblings who claim descent from Eadweard Muybridge’s jockey are threatened by an extraterrestrial flying predator.
This film should never have been 130 minutes long. If the naturalism of the creature and the characters’ traumas had been allowed to develop, it could have worked better, but this is not serious. It’s Evolution (2001), rebuilt around a series of whimsical set pieces and cryptid media jokes that sustain only 90 minutes. As a cynical love letter to cinema, it’s better than La La Land (2016), and it looks better too, but it doesn’t have more substance.