jordan peele nope movie review

It’s surprising how little information about writer/director Jordan Peele ’s “Nope” has leaked since it was first announced. There have been a few trailers that show what may or may not be the film’s primary threat, and the marketing team has done a very good job with posters of its main cast members looking up at the sky and uttering the film’s title. All that thirst for capitalistic box office gain comes with a price, namely that it builds hype and an audience expectation that may not be met once the finished product is unveiled. This invariably leads to whiny complaints on Twitter and a plethora of think pieces I have no desire to read, even if I didn’t like the movie.

I’ve always had begrudging respect for a filmmaker who refuses to cater to a viewer’s pre-ordained expectations, even if said viewer is yours truly. It’s why I attend David Lynch movies despite never being a fan of the director’s work. So, I’ve been replaying a throwaway line of dialogue in my head as a potential explanation for how “Nope” is constructed and executed. In response to a pitch for his services, cinematographer Antlers Holst ( Michael Wincott ) tells Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) that he “makes one movie for them, and one for me.” This is a callback to John Cassavetes ’ philosophy/excuse for appearing in trash—the pay allowed him to finance the movies he wanted to create.

After the massively entertaining, Oscar-winning calling card of “ Get Out ,” Jordan Peele moved toward a hybrid of audience pleaser and filmmaker’s jones with “ Us .” That film was less blatant and required more work on the audience’s part, which made it fascinating for some and frustrating for others. It was also powered by a career-best performance by Lupita Nyong’o, whose dual role was unshakably strange and multilayered. There is no equivalent performance in “Nope” to anchor viewers, and it’s about three times as messy, but I got the feeling that Holst is Peele’s stand-in, that is, the director is revealing to us through a character that he made this film to amuse and please himself. If that is true, then Holst’s final scene says a lot about his creator; it’s a moment of self-sacrifice in lieu of the perfect camera shot.

Prior to the pitch for work scene, Holst and Emerald met on the set of a commercial he was shooting. She arrived late to assist her horse-wrangler brother Otis Jr. ( Daniel Kaluuya ) with the animal hired for the ad. That shoot goes awry, but not before Peele drops some breadcrumbs that will lead viewers through the forest he’s built for us to get lost inside. He also includes a nice cameo from nighttime soap opera legend Donna Mills . Speaking of cameos, the opening scene of “Nope” features Keith David as Otis Sr., head of Haywood Hollywood Horses, the family business. The Haywood’s ancestors were the first Black stuntpeople and animal wranglers in Hollywood, going back to the earliest days of movie making. That seems like an extraneous detail, but nothing is truly extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

The rest of the cast features Steven Yuen as Jupe, a barker who runs an alien-based carnival of sorts out in the same middle of nowhere the Haywoods have their ranch, and Angel ( Brandon Perea ), a techie specializing in surveillance equipment he sells out of a Best Buy clone called Fry’s. Jupe is the survivor of a horrific freak accident on a television show that had the first use of a certain type of animal. Angel is hired to install fancy cameras on the Haywood ranch so that Otis and Emerald can be the first to capture “the Oprah shot” of a specific event I won’t reveal. All this focus on being the first to do something! Again, no detail is completely extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

With “Nope,” Peele continues to explore and repeat certain elements of his prior works. Like “Us,” there’s a Bible quote that may be another breadcrumb to follow. This time it’s Nahum 3:6, which says “I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.” There’s also a focus on animals, with horses playing a major role here. Unlike the deer in “Get Out” and the rabbits in “Us,” symbols of creatures being preyed upon, Peele reverses the power dynamic by turning into prey the most dangerous predator of all. There’s also the unusual use of an inanimate object; in “Us” it was scissors, in “Nope” it’s a fake horse and those weird, swaying air-filled things every used car dealer seems to have.

“Nope” is not as good as “Get Out” or “Us,” but it’s definitely Peele’s creepiest movie. He’s always been more Rod Serling than Rob Zombie , and that’s most evident here. There’s humor to be had in the minority characters’ reactions to horror (yes, they say “nope” the way most people would say “oh HELL NAW!”), but the director really leans into Hitchcock’s tenet about suspense vs. surprise. The wait for something awful to happen is always worse than when it does. Additionally, Peele remains a master of misdirection, offering fleeting glimpses of something that’s amiss or keeping the most brutal violence just beyond our view. The sound mix on this is aces, and I’ll never tire of horror movies that center on Black protagonists who are more than just fodder for whatever’s killing everybody.

Peele also gets good performances out of Kaluuya and Palmer, who believably work the sibling angle with all its longstanding grudges, in-jokes and patterns based on who’s older. Wincott wields his wonderful voice as a force of nature. Yuen seems to be off-kilter and the movie’s weak link, but the more I thought about his plotline, the more his performance made sense. I think he’s the film’s biggest breadcrumb in terms of figuring it all out. As for the special effects, they’re interesting, to say the least.

Truth be told, “Nope” reaches a conventional end point that would probably be more satisfying to most audiences had the journey been more tuned to the usual ways these stories are told. After my IMAX screening, there was a smattering of audience applause but I heard lots of grumbling. Call me a sadist if you must, but this is my favorite type of audience reaction. One particularly angry guy behind me on the escalator said “I can’t wait for the critics reviews calling this ‘splendid’!” “Nope” isn’t splendid, but it is pretty damn good. I had a lot of fun trying to figure it out. It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title.

Available in theaters on July 22nd.

Odie Henderson

Odie “Odienator” Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood
Keke Palmer as Emerald 'Em' Haywood
Steven Yeun as Ricky 'Jupe' Park
Brandon Perea as Angel Torres
Michael Wincott as Craig
Barbie Ferreira as Nessie
Donna Mills as Bonnie Clayton
Terry Notary as Gordy
Jennifer Lafleur as Phyllis
Keith David as Otis Haywood Sr.

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Hoyte van Hoytema
Jordan Peele
Michael Abels
Nicholas Monsour

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‘Nope’ Review: Hell Yes

Jordan Peele’s genre-melting third feature stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as brother-and-sister horse wranglers defending the family ranch from an extraterrestrial threat.

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By A.O. Scott

The trailers for Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” one of the most feverishly anticipated movies of the summer, have raised some intriguing questions. Is it a western? A horror film? Science fiction? Satire? Will it fulfill the expectations raised by Peele’s first two mind-bending, zeitgeist-surfing features, “Get Out” and “Us,” or confound them?

I can now report that the answer to all of those questions is: Yup. Which is to say that there are some fascinating internal tensions within the movie, along with impeccably managed suspense, sharp jokes and a beguiling, unnerving atmosphere of all-around weirdness.

“Nope” feels less polemically pointed than “Us” or “Get Out,” more at home in its idiosyncrasies and flights of imagination even as it follows, in the end, a more conventional narrative path. This might be cause for some disappointment, since Peele’s keen dialectical perspective on our collective American pathologies has been a bright spot in an era of franchised corporate wish fulfillment. At the same time, he’s an artist with the freedom and confidence to do whatever he wants to, and one who knows how to challenge audiences without alienating them.

In any case, it would be inaccurate to claim that the social allegory has been scrubbed away: Every genre Peele invokes is a flytrap for social meanings, and you can’t watch this cowboys-and-aliens monster movie without entertaining some deep thoughts about race, ecology, labor and the toxic, enchanting power of modern popular culture.

“Nope” addresses such matters in a mood that feels more ruminant than argumentative. The main target of its critique is also the principal object of its affection, which we might call — using a name that has lately become something of a fighting word — cinema.

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‘nope’ review: jordan peele’s rapturous and suspenseful sci-fi ride.

A menacing force threatens a Southern California horse ranch in the director’s third film, starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun.

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Daniel Kaluuya in Nope, written and directed by Jordan Peele.

Nope , Jordan Peele ’s latest offering, slinks and slithers from the clutches of snap judgment. It avoids the comfort of tidy conclusions too. This elusive third feature from the director of Get Out and Us peacocks its ambitions (and budget) while indulging in narrative tangents and detours. It is sprawling and vigorous. Depending on your appetite for the heady and sonorous, it will either feel frustratingly perplexing or strike you as a work of unquestionable genius.

Full credits

Distributor: Universal Pictures Production company: Monkeypaw Productions Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David Director-screenwriter: Jordan Peele Producers: Jordan Peele, Ian Cooper Executive producers: Robert Graf, Win Rosenfeld Director of photography: Hoyte van Hoytema Production designer: Ruth De Jong Costume designer: Alex Bovaird Editor: Nicholas Monsour Composer: Michael Abels Casting director: Carmen Cuba

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The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery. The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery. The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.

Jordan Peele
Daniel Kaluuya
Keke Palmer
Brandon Perea
2.4K User reviews
405 Critic reviews
77 Metascore
43 wins & 173 nominations

Top cast 45

Emerald Haywood

Angel Torres

Antlers Holst

Ricky 'Jupe' Park

Otis Haywood Sr.

Ryder Muybridge

Bonnie Clayton

Fynn Bachman

Young Ricky 'Jupe' Park

Mary Jo Elliott

Phyllis Mayberry …

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Trivia The very early clip of a jockey riding a horse, which Emerald claims features her and OJ's ancestor, is a real 1878 animated series of photographs, one of the first moving images ever, which has come to be called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878) . Sallie Gardner is the name of the horse; the two jockeys were listed as being named "C. Marvin" and "G. Domm." Neither of their identities are known, though they very well could have been black as Emerald claims. In those days many jockeys were black, such as thirteen of the fifteen jockeys racing at the first Kentucky Derby in 1875.
Goofs After the horse Clover is found wandering out in the field, the character O.J. begins to escort the horse back to its home. But once they start walking, the horse's mane changes colors between black and white (indicating two different horses were used). This happens about 45 to 46 minutes into the film.

Antlers Holst : This dream you're chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you... it's the dream you never wake up from.

Crazy credits At the very end of the credits, a cartoony image/advertisement appears: "Come ride through Jupiter's Claim, as seen in Nope, at Universal Studios Hollywood, only on the World-Famous Studio Tour."
Connections Featured in Super Bowl LVI (2022)
Soundtracks La Vie c'est Chouette Music by François d'Aime Lyrics by Pierre Billon Performed by Jodie Foster Courtesy of Cinemag Bodard By arrangement with Editions Montparnasse

User reviews 2.4K

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Mar 11, 2024

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July 22, 2022 (United States)
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Firestone Ranch, Agua Dulce, California, USA (Haywood Ranch)
Universal Pictures
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$68,000,000 (estimated)
$123,277,080
$44,366,910
Jul 24, 2022
$171,235,592

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Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
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Nope Is a Resplendent Spectacle Packed With Way Too Many Ideas

T he best part of writer-director Jordan Peele ’s atmospheric science-fiction extravaganza Nope is the beginning, an introduction—after a brief prologue—to a world unlike any most of us have ever seen, and a character rich with possibility. In that early sequence, we meet Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ Haywood, part of a family who has run a working ranch for generations. We’ll later learn that the business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, provides beautiful, well-trained horses for movies and television, and for years it’s been a lucrative operation for OJ’s father, Otis (Keith David), as it was for his father and grandfather before him. But very early in the film, as Otis sits astride a white steed named Ghost, disaster strikes. Just before it does, OJ notes the gathering of some strange clouds, and he hears a weird howling in the sky—given Peele’s penchant for biblical references and imagery, it could be the sound of apocalyptic horses freed from their riders and out for vengeance.

The next thing OJ knows, his father has been struck by an invisible something. A minute ago Otis had been crowing over how well the business had been doing, and now he’s slumped in the saddle. OJ rushes him to the hospital, to no avail. Later he stares in disbelief at the small projectile that killed, or helped kill, his father, cleaned up and housed in a baggie. This scene shows, beautifully, how a life can change in a minute, and sets up a challenge rich with dramatic possibilities: OJ now has to take the reins of a successful family business—a Black-owned one at that, with a reputation to uphold—and as Kaluuya plays him, dutiful and sensitive but a bit reticent about facing the world, we can see he’s not sure he’s up to the task.

Nope could have been all about that, or about that but also layered with elements of sci-fi horror. But the early promise of Nope doesn’t lead where you expect. Instead, it leads to dozens of unexpected places, which is oddly less gratifying. What OJ sees in the sky, and what it wants with humans, becomes a little clearer with each passing scene. There are other players in this drama: OJ’s outgoing and magnetic sister Emerald ( Keke Palmer ), is better at facing the public than he is, but she wants nothing to do with the business. (OJ’s work demands that he know how to handle animals and deal with the human egos of show business, and it’s the latter that throws him.)

Ricky “Jupe” Park ( Steven Yeun ) is a former child star who runs a schlocky Old-West tourist attraction near the Haywood ranch, but who has designs on an even bigger enterprise. He’s also scarred, it appears, from a childhood run-in with a murderous chimpanzee, a story Peele hints at in Nope ’s prologue and fleshes out later in a terrifying flashback. The other characters hovering around the vast, fringey margins of Nope include the employee of a local Best Buy-type store, Angel (Brandon Perea), and a cocky weirdo cinematographer with the assertively eccentric name Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott). At one point we’re treated to some grainy footage he’s obsessed with, which appears to show a boa constrictor getting ready to devour a tiger. This is the movie’s way of proving he’s a man of sick tastes, but it’s also an image we can’t unsee.

Steven Yeun as Ricky gestures up toward the sky

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And then there’s the mysterious thing in the sky that no one is supposed to talk about until after they’ve seen the movie. It’s a thing with a hole. There are certain things it doesn’t like. It follows no rules but its own, until Otis learns that maybe it will follow some rules, and how much you think those rules make sense—even in the highly subjective world of science fiction—will dictate how much pleasure you get out of Nope.

Because Nope , enjoyable as a spectacle but conceptually barely thought through, is all over the place. Peele can’t take just one or two interesting ideas and follow their trail of complexity. He likes to layer ideas into lofty multitextured quilts—the problem is that his most compelling perceptions are often dropped only to be obscured by murkier ones. He has an eye for dazzling visuals, but it seems he comes up with the visuals first and tries to hook ideas to them later. In this case, he decides those inflatable tube dancers you see outside used-car lots might be cool to use somehow, but their effectiveness, visually or in terms of moving the plot forward, is debatable.

Contrary to popular opinion, horror movies don’t necessarily have to be about anything: we’ve all read enough treatises on how 1950s horror films were really all about fear of the Communist threat to last a lifetime. Sometimes great horror films are about nothing more than our own shadowy inner lives, playing on fears that seem silly in the daylight but become much more overwhelming at night. Peele’s movies don’t have to be about anything—it could be enough that their imagery is often haunting, and inventive, by itself. One thing’s for sure: he’s comfortable with grand orchestrations, and he enjoys filling the expanse of a movie screen. There are plenty of gorgeous images in Nope, including one that Peele makes us wait for: the sight of Kaluuya, a regal actor, on the back of a horse, a glorious Elmer Bernstein-inflected score swirling around him, as sizzling and dramatic as a setting desert sun. Peele loves movies, all sorts of movies. It seems he loves making movies, too.

Jordan Peele in an orange hoodie, on horseback, rides toward the camera

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‘Nope’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Third Film Is His Most Ambitious and Hilarious Horror Story Yet

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Watching Jordan Peele evolve as a director over the course of just three films has been fascinating to watch. While his first film, Get Out , was a precise knockout that blended horror and social commentary, while Us was a bit shaggier, yet even more terrifying, as Peele told a story that left haunting open-ended questions in its wake. With his third film, Nope , Peele is at his most expansive, his most adventurous as a filmmaker, and having more fun than we’ve seen from him in his already impressive filmography. With Nope, Peele once again proves that he’s not just one of the most interesting filmmakers working in horror today, he’s one of the most interesting filmmakers working, period.

Nope centers around the sibling ranch owners OJ ( Daniel Kaluuya ) and Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ), who take over Haywood’s Hollywood Horses after their father Otis Haywood Sr. ( Keith David ) dies mysteriously. The Haywood family are direct descendants of the jockey riding a horse in the first film ever made, “The Galloping Horse,” and the Haywood’s continue in the family business, providing horses for various entertainment projects. But with the surprising death of Otis, the ranch has seen better days.

One night, OJ notices an unidentified flying object in the sky, and he and Emerald decide to try and capture footage that could help save their farm, and probably make them famous as well. With Ricky “Jupe” Park ( Steven Yeun ), a former child star and owner of the Western-themed amusement park Jupiter’s Claim offering to buy their farm, OJ and Emerald—along with the help of Fry’s Electronics employee Angel Torres ( Brandon Perea )—attempt to prove that the truth is out there.

Em and OJ, played by actors Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya, walk through an electronics store in Nope

RELATED: First 'Nope' Reactions Call Jordan Peele's Movie Indescribable, Divisive, and Terrifying

Stylistically, Nope feels in line with other iconic director’s third theatrical films, like Steven Spielberg ’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind , or M. Night Shyamalan ’s Signs . Yet instead of Spielberg’s alien films, Nope maybe feels most like Jaws , but instead of looking to the oceans for a sign of life, we’re looking to the skies for proof. Peele, along with editor Nicholas Monsour , knows exactly where to place the camera to maximize the unsettling nature of this story, as well as exactly when to cut away from a haunting moment. Peele and Monsour carefully keep the mysteries of this story close to the chest, slowly revealing details with brilliant precision and care.

But this excitement of what is really going on in the skies, and the dynamic between OJ and Emerald make this Peele’s most flat-out entertaining film, more of an exciting adventure with horror elements thrown in for good measure. Peele shot Nope with IMAX cameras, which leads to this story feeling massive in scope—even though it mostly takes place in a California gulch. Once again, Peele proves that he’s a master of tone and handling situations in just the right way. Peele blends unnerving imagery and astounding concept with just the right amount of humor that breaks the tension when it becomes almost too unbearable.

While Nope might not be as overt in its messaging as Get Out or Us , Peele explores ideas about the beauty of filmmaking and practical effects, trauma, and how Hollywood can easily dispose of its artists. But Peele does all this with a subtlety that he’s never shown at this level before, making these elements essential to the story, but without being too overt with the point he’s trying to make. While this might be his most bombastic film in terms of what he’s attempting to it, it’s also maybe his most understated in its messaging.

But not only is this maybe Peele’s most amusing film, but it’s also arguably his funniest, thanks to his fantastic cast that knows just how to react in these insane situations. From the moment she literally steals her opening scene, Palmer is phenomenal here. Emerald is a joy to watch in every scene, and her demonstrative attitude balances well with the muted and still performance coming from Kaluuya. Yet despite this, OJ is a blast to follow as well, and while he doesn’t say much, his expressive eyes say so much, and almost every time Kaluuya opens his mouth, it’s important or absolutely hilarious. Also excellent is Yeun, and his past trauma leads to some of the most uncomfortable and strangest moments in the film, while Michael Wincott is an excellent choice for documentarian Antlers Holst, Nope ’s version of Jaws ’ Quint. When Nope really gets cooking and Kaluuya, Palmer, Perea, and Wincott are working together, it’s truly some of the most captivating filmmaking in a film this year.

The real beauty of Nope , however, is watching Peele explore this playground, continuing to prove that he’s a maestro at crafting stories that are extremely weird, yet engrossing and impressive to watch. Few filmmakers can boast a filmography as fantastic as Peele already has after three films, and it’s truly exciting to watch him go all out and explore his unique visions in whatever capacity he wants. At this point, Peele has proven expertise as a director and his virtuosity in achieving his vision that no matter what the narrative, every Peele story feels distinctly his, and like the viewer is in the capable hands of a truly great filmmaker.

This might all sound hyperbolic, but it’s hard not to be blown away by this library that Peele has made for himself, and to watch yet another ingenious tale from the mind of Peele unravel on the screen. Between Get Out , Us , and now, Nope , Peele is exploring his capabilities as a filmmaker, and the more experimental and grand he gets, the more he proves that he is more than able to bring his dreams to life. Peele reaffirms that there’s nothing like his films today, and it’s truly a wonder to behold Peele in his element with a film like Nope .

Nope opens in theaters on July 22.

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Nope Reviews

I can’t confidently say that everything works, but most of Peele’s latest feels as experimental and creative as it is simple and fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2024

With unflinching dexterity, Peele and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema juxtapose the terror of encountering a being from beyond with one of the most claustrophobic scenes ever caught on film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2024

Nope‘s combination of stellar acting, incredible cinematography and awesome sound design makes this a cinematic experience that’s out of this world.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 15, 2024

Jordan Peele crafted an impressively well-crafted sci-fi flick that while it displays clear homage to classics, feels unlike anything we’ve seen before it.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 12, 2024

Nope is simply put one of the year's best films

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 4, 2024

Jordan Peele’s mind is astonishing. He takes such large concepts and layers them upon each other, building out a metaphorical journey that only deepens with each viewing.

Full Review | Jul 3, 2024

“Nope” is really a story about the underdogs in showbiz trying to survive instead of getting out, but Peele pulls punches when it comes to showing how demented they are in that pursuit.

Full Review | Jun 9, 2024

The supporting players work together in ways that show Peele’s prowess, not only as a visual filmmaker, but as one who casts well and trusts his actors. Nope is a wild ride, and one I can’t wait to take again.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2024

Jordan Peele’s third film captures the terrible beauty of our endless fascination with events no matter how horrific.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

Nope, Peele’s third directorial outing, may debut in the horror genre, but there’s more to the brilliant film than audiences’ expectations.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 7, 2023

More stylish than substantial.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 7, 2023

I love all of Jordan's movies so far, but this one might be my favorite just because there's so much to unpack. Every time I think about it I find more things that I need to talk about and it's the gift that keeps giving.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 14, 2023

It's a very layered movie, lot of themes on Hollywood and how it uses people and kinda chews them up and spits them out - figuratively. He [Jordan Peele] is probably one of our best directors today.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 10, 2023

The failure of Nope is partly because of Peele's lack of restraint in terms of mangling together mismatched ideas.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 9, 2023

Although the vision is stronger than the pen this time around, the Spielberg-esque scope is all-embracing, and his craftiness in the individual horror/sci-fi set pieces is utterly remarkable.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 29, 2023

As with his previous films, Peele wears his inspirations on his sleeve. This time around he mines heavily from two Spielberg classics, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

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An almost perfect spectacle that dives into our obsessions with spectacles in our real life. A unique blockbuster that will make you afraid of looking up.

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Jordan Peele has made a science fiction thriller that is one of the most visually striking films in recent memory.

Known for his powerful social commentary in US and Get Out, Jordan Peele reinvents the summer blockbuster through a neo-sci-fi western that looks at society’s obsession with spectacle.

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Nope review: Jordan Peele’s third film is funny, weird as hell and thrillingly original

The consistently brilliant filmmaker has traded the claustrophobic, labyrinthine quality of ‘get out’ and ‘us’ for open skies and pure spectacle, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Jordan Peele. Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Wrenn Schmidt, Barbie Ferreira, Keith David. 15, 130 minutes.

When proof of extraterrestrial life slides its way into the lives of Nope ’s underdog heroes, their first instinct is to find a way to monetise it. That’s the most honest reaction I’ve ever seen in a horror film. It’s also exactly what I’d expect from Jordan Peele , a filmmaker who sees the social condition with such simple clarity that his films always feel like a series of mic drops. Nope is funny. It’s weird as hell. It’s a large-scale, popcorn sci-fi with a razor-sharp intellect. Otis Jr “OJ” Haywood ( Daniel Kaluuya ) and Emerald “Em” Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) recently lost their father in a freak accident. They’ve coped by running in opposite directions. OJ shuts down totally; Em lives her days as one excitable performance opportunity after another. But it’s easy to unite them under a single front, namely when an opportunity presents itself to catch “the Oprah shot”, or concrete, un-debunkable UFO footage that TV hosts would pay thousands for.

The possibility of extraterrestrials, as Brandon Perea’s tech kid hanger-on Angel explains, today seems less tied to philosophical questions about our existence, and more to pop culture fluff like the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. Peele’s underlying message with Nope is clear: there’s no remaining part of the galaxy that can’t be exploited for entertainment. TikTok, YouTube and the local news cycle dangle the promise of overnight fame in front of people’s eyes, subliminally training us all to view every experience – no matter how traumatic – as potential content.

And Peele, with that same exquisite imagination he brought to Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), always finds the most unexpected ways to prove his point. Take Ricky “Jupe” Park ( Steven Yeun , who can hide decades of sadness in a smile), the owner of an Old West attraction known as Jupiter’s Claim. It’s been fully Disneyfied into a ghoulish parody of the American myth, much like the pier-side hall of mirrors in Us . Jupe, as a child, starred in a Nineties sitcom called Gordy’s Home, which was swiftly cancelled after a horrific tragedy. He now relives those “six minutes and 13 seconds” of terror for a steady stream of curious visitors to his in-home museum, enthusiastically describing the subsequent Saturday Night Live sketch lampooning the incident. What an honour to have the worst day of your life turned into a punchline, right?

The Haywoods, meanwhile, have taken over their late father’s stunt horse business. Em starts every film shoot with the reminder that they, in fact, are the direct descendants of the unnamed and forgotten Black jockey in Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion – the first series of photographic cards strung together to create a moving image. The precursor to all cinema. “Since the moment pictures could move, we got skin in the game,” Em says. And yet, the Haywoods are never relieved of the burden of having to prove themselves. As with Jupe. As with people of colour everywhere just trying to carve out their path in life. They have no choice but to constantly commodify themselves. Those frustrations drive both Kaluuya and Palmer’s work here. Kaluuya is a true one-of-a-kind talent, who still turns out an intensely magnetic performance with a character explicitly written to be sullen and uncharismatic. Palmer gives us the kind of capable horror heroine that’s impossible not to root for.

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It doesn’t quite feel accurate to say that Nope ’s sci-fi premise is indebted to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Jaws . Or to Hitchcock’s thrills. Or to classic B-movie mayhem. Rather, Peele’s innate understanding of cinematic history, which may have come from his years of lampooning movie tropes on the sketch show Key & Peele , only provides the foundations. Nope is his own creation. His own universe. Even a direct reference to Akira ’s famous bike-slide shot can’t shatter the illusion that what we’re watching is wholly, thrillingly original. There’s always been an unshowy confidence in how Peele’s films move, from the bourbon-y smoothness of his camerawork, to the symbolic potency of ordinary objects. Get Out has its porcelain teacup. Us has scissors. Nope has a tennis shoe inexplicably balanced on its heel, and wacky waving inflatable men with rictus grins plastered on their faces.

There are other images, too, that I dare not spoil but which are so elegantly composed that my mind, without question, quietly added them to the great cinematic canon of horror imagery. Nope is a film that, on top of everything, celebrates the skill of great craftspeople – not only on screen, with the Haywoods, but with the breathless beauty of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s work (the film was shot for Imax), and a soundscape, overseen by Johnnie Burn, that draws equal power from silence as it does chaos. You could, certainly, make the argument that Nope is the most straightforward of Peele’s films so far. He’s traded the claustrophobic, labyrinthine quality of Get Out and Us for open skies and pure spectacle. But the genius of his work is that, in the end, none of that really makes any difference. He still gets the same results. Peele, really, is the magician disguised as a filmmaker. Nope is the sleight of hand so slick you’ll never question how the trick was pulled off.

‘Nope’ is in cinemas from 12 August

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Jordan Peele Invades the Western With ‘Nope,’ a Thrilling Salute to Spectacle

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Early in Nope , Jordan Peele ’s thrilling new horror movie, a woman named Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) tells a story. She and her brother OJ ( Daniel Kaluuya ) are horse handlers and ranch owners by trade, who parlay their animal wrangling skills on TV and film shoots, which is where we meet them today. But the ranch is a family business, passed down to them by their father, the late Otis Haywood (Keith David), and by his father before him. Go back far enough in their family line and you’ll meet the man Emerald tells us about in her story: the Black jockey captured in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photographs of a galloping horse, which, strung to together, became one of the earliest known examples of stop-motion photography — essentially, of movies. We know the name of the horse: Sallie Gardner. We know the name of the owner of the horse: Leland Stanford. What we don’t know is the name of the man astride the horse. This is the story Emerald tells us — before telling us about her side hustles and where we can find her on social media. A girl’s gotta eat. What’s any of this got to do with aliens? In Peele’s movie, everything. Nope is in large part a movie about what cannot be tamed, and spectacle — our dire, damning hunger for it — is at the top of that list. (Aliens — animals, broadly — make for a very close second.) The point of opening a movie like this with a reminder about the birth of movies isn’t just to school us on where Black people fit into that history, though that’s obviously very much to the point; even the set decor of Nope underscores the notion, down to a poster in the Haywoods’ ranch for the classic, too-little-known Black western Buck and the Preacher — a reminder that the history of movies is still in need of all kinds of intervention.

But Peele, a director who’s made a name for himself by infusing horror with healthy spoonfuls of Black common sense and a love of movies, has even more ideas up his sleeve. A lesson of Muybridge’s work was that the camera, stopping time, could see things that the human eye could not. Images are evidence. You want proof of how a horse gallops, of the instant when none of its hooves are touching the ground? Only a photo can convince you. You want proof of UFOs? You want the first stakes in that evidence before it’s ripped out of your hands, destined to become the property of a curious, shameless, hungry public? Well, you better hope those aliens are in your backyard — which, as it turns out for Emerald and OJ, they are.

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Maybe the siblings should consider themselves lucky. The day that we see them on a movie set with one of their horses, named Lucky, is the same day that the former child star Ricky Park (Steven Yeun) offers to buy Lucky — in fact, to buy their entire, family-owned ranch — off of their hands. When that day becomes night, the Haywoods learn why. There’s something in the sky: something making their horses go wild and disappear into the night. If you’ve seen horror movies, you know the signs. A cloud that doesn’t move by day. Brown-outs and strange noises at night. They install video cameras around their remote, lonely property, tucked away in the northern California hills, and on the roof of their house. But the suspense is not in the question of why. Emerald asks her brother early on if he thinks there’s a spaceship hovering over their front yard. All he has to do is nod yep .

Nope is not the kind of movie to obscure what it’s “about” — that’s one of the most satisfying things about it. It’s a little like the M. Night Shyamalan classic Signs in that way. That movie knew that we know the signs. It doesn’t build toward a climactic reveal of the UFOs at its center: It reveals them halfway through, in — what else? — video footage taken from on the ground, not unlike the kind that the Haywoods soon want to create. The pleasure of Shyamalan’s movie isn’t in seeing where the signs lead, which is toward the inevitable, but rather in watching its characters try to make sense of those signs, try to integrate what they’re seeing into their understanding of the world, to the point of these mysteries inspiring a crisis of faith.

Nope is similar, only it’s about the crisis of looking. What do you do when you hear tell of some awful, incredible, little-known event — a long-ago murder or freak accident, the kind of deep cut that’s only barely persisted in the cultural memory? Many of us cannot help but look it up. What’s the first thing you do when some foreign object in the sky flits over your head, just out of sight? You look up.

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Peele’s ingenious idea is to use that instinct against us. It’s more than a matter of unidentified flying objects. It’s a matter of lore, of violence — of horror, of course. Peele has rightly been noticed for his profusion of movie references, his almost scholarly, but in no way didactic or merely referential, skill at reminding us of the bedrocks of the genre. Nope is another masterclass in this trend in his work — just look at his approach to the mere idea of the UFO. The flying saucer myth is alive and well in this movie. But it wouldn’t be Peele if that trope went unrevised.

Peele’s career as a director has been overly defined by the term “social thriller.” Less remarked-upon, but equally important, is his unabashed investment in symbolism, the kind of high-concept thinking that can push a movie along the axis of its ideas, distinct from its emotional logic or its genre satisfaction. At its best, as in Get Out, Peele merges that impulse with his well-honed knowledge of tropes and his incredible sense of humor to create something as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, a movie that can end with a classic, villainous infodump without feeling overwhelmed and deflated by explanation. Us , his solid second thriller, falls prey to the latter: the concept and action were almost at odds with each other, resulting in a movie with too many symbols and too strong of a need to talk us through them, whereas its action was already doing enough.

Nope is like the cosmically perfect stepchild of the two. Peele brings the concept and the beautifully achieved terror together — including a sequence halfway through the movie, beginning when a live show goes wrong and ending with a sickening twist on a house of horrors. It’s segment of the movie that uses every resource available to threaten the senses, from the clashing thuds of heavy rain to one of the most eerie examples of a movie scream that I think I’ve heard. This is a movie that knows the power of images. It has learned, from the greats of the genre, that what we fear most is what can’t be seen, what’s merely implied. All the camera has to do is trace an arc across the sky and you’ll believe something is there. (Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who shot Dunkirk — an IMAX movie, like this one — was a perfect choice for this project, able to carve daring, evocative shapes onto the screen through what feel like the simplest means.)

None of it would work without people. Palmer and Kaluuya could not be better. Palmer is down in every way, as stylish and unflappable as Samuel L. Jackson or Jada Pinkett Smith, with a taste for stoner mayhem and, when the movie calls for it, action-movie know-how. She’s who you’d want to be in a movie like this. But you’re not Keke Palmer — sorry. She makes for a fun pair with Brandon Perea, who plays a tech-store clerk in name but is really this movie’s version of a video-store clerk: in on it, knowledgeable, reluctantly down, and ultimately in over his head.

Kaluuya, meanwhile, offers us something else. His OJ is a man of few words who seems sterner than he is, though not out of shyness. It takes a while to realize the archetype he’s drawing from here, one that belongs to another genre — the genre that the character Antlers Holst, played by Michael Wincott, with his Eastwood growl, ought to remind you of.

Nope may be a horror movie in which the most damning thing you can do is to look — but the key to the movie’s conceit is in the irony in wanting to be seen: in which the Black descendants of a man whose name has been lost to movie history find themselves eager to be handed the reins of their own story and given a chance to tell it themselves, for once. One of the terms that Emerald uses in describing her great ancestor, that Black jockey atop Leland Stanford’s horse, is “action hero.” She claims him as one of the first. And because of the horse, she goes further: He’s a Western star. Midway through, Nope dials back on the heightened frights of its horror to become something else. It becomes a story of invasion — not just of the extraterrestrial kind, but of the land-born, territorially offensive kind. It becomes a movie about protecting the homestead from the most invasive species of all: other people. It becomes a Western.

What that means for Nope should be left to the movie to reveal. But it’s not the kind of thing that can be reduced to a plot point. It’s why, as you watch, that alien life form in the sky may start to resemble something a little familiar, a movie symbol born of these same landscapes, a totem of movie heroism. Then, like the movie itself, it becomes something else: an undulating, mocking paean to spectacle. You can’t help but look. But here, looks kill.

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‘Nope’ review: say yes to Jordan Peele’s genre-hopping comedy-horror

The talented filmmaker's latest has met a mixed response, but you should still seek it out

I t probably would have been easy enough for someone as talented and clever as writer-director Jordan Peele to crank out a few spiritual sequels to his brilliant horror-thriller Get Out . After all, he seems fluent in the Twilight Zone rhythms that could inform a series of genre-tinged parables about ‘how we live now’. So it’s been all the more impressive to see Peele move in stranger, less obvious directions, first with the dreamlike Us and now with the somewhat less obtuse but still wholly original Nope . It doesn’t ruin too much about the new movie to call it Peele’s take on alien-invasion pictures such as M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs or Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. These are movies with an intimate, ground-level view of spectacular sights, through the eyes of just a few characters.

Yet there is also spectacle in Nope – even when it’s seen outside of eye-popping IMAX format. Spectacle is very much what Peele’s movie is about: The peculiar and undeniable human instinct to fix our eyes upon horror, tragedy, and untamed nature. OJ ( Daniel Kaluuya ) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) have caught glimpses of all three, first as part of their family’s Hollywood horse-training business, and then as their father Otis (Keith David) is killed by a coin falling from the sky amid a bunch of other mysterious debris.

Months later, some initially unseen force lurks around their ranch, stealing their horses, and though OJ cuts a handsome cowboy figure, they’re not dealing with traditional western villains. There’s something out there in the wide-open skies, and the siblings decide to capture it on camera. This project attracts the interest of a UFO-obsessed techie (Brandon Perea) and a flinty cinematographer (Michael Wincott).

Exactly how this quartet goes about their task, what they find, and how it connects (thematically, if not literally) to a local sorta-celebrity – a former child star named Ricky Park (Steven Yuen) who survived a gruesome scene on a sitcom set back in the ’90s – should be left to the viewer to discover. Peele moves through his story sinuously, aided by complementary lead performances: Kaluuya plays it gracefully, while Palmer toys with overacting before unveiling a more nuanced turn. There’s something pleasingly off-kilter about the way Nope hops between genres. It’s often very funny, but not exactly a comedy; it induces shivers of fear without tilting all the way into horror – and Peele remains especially adept at bending one genre backward until it flips unexpectedly into another.

From the movie’s unpredictability, patterns and motifs emerge; something as simple as the one-word title becomes part mantra, part running joke, part time-keeping metronome. It turns out that Peele’s background as a sketch comedian doesn’t just make him aware of certain genre tropes, or able to inject humour into tense situations (though both of those things are true). At times, he seems to imply that comedy and horror are both ways of processing the perverse mysteries of the world—and looking at things we shouldn’t be looking at. This also makes Nope a film that rewards repeat watching.

Director: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun
Release date: August 12 (UK cinemas)
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'Nope' review: Jordan Peele takes UFOs for a successful spin with Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer

Yep, it was a good idea for Jordan Peele to have the keys to a flying saucer movie.

The subtly ambitious “Nope” (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) trades the writer/director’s penchant for horror – where he’s become one of the most important new voices in recent years – for some old-fashioned sci-fi terror and full-on big-screen spectacle.

Teamed again with his “Get Out” star Daniel Kaluuya and bringing a great Keke Palmer along for the ride, Peele takes sizable swings with themes amid a tasty slushie of familiar film flavors, from dark Spielbergian wizardry to wonky Tarantino Western to B-movie chills.

'Nope': Jordan Peele explains meaning behind his mysterious new movie's title

The introverted OJ Haywood (Kaluuya) and his mercurial little sister Emerald (Palmer) are Hollywood horse wranglers living on a remote California ranch. Their business is struggling six months after the untimely death of their father (Keith David), a victim of a strange downpour of coins and metal. And things are getting weirder in this dusty gulch for them and Ricky “Jupe” Park ( Steven Yeun ), a former child actor with a tragic backstory who runs the neighboring amusement park.

While Jupe readies for a major new attraction, OJ begins to notice a weirdness on the ground and in the sky. His horses start going missing. A cloud sits still and doesn’t move. Then a strange airborne object zooms around with otherworldly speed.

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Wondering if aliens are involved, he and Emerald decide they need proof (and the financial windfall that might come with it), so the siblings enlist the help of an overeager tech guy (Brandon Perea) and a grizzled filmmaker (Michael Wincott).

“Nope” isn’t a particularly scary UFO film but is effectively unnerving. Peele plays with his audience in devilish ways before going big and bold with the visuals (particularly Hoyte van Hoytema’s dazzling cinematography) as well as the white-knuckle tension. Just don’t go in expecting “Get Out” or “Us” : Peele’s first two standouts are focused in human explorations, whereas “Nope” is more scattershot with its storytelling. The filmmaker touches on an array of subplots and intriguing ideas (the dangerous indifference of show business, mankind’s disparate reactions to a life-altering situation) but attempts too many between a visceral, gripping first half and the more conventional and rousing second.

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The supporting characters are a mixed bag: Perea’s frazzled geek-squad dude adds to the movie’s dark humor, though Yeun’s modern P.T. Barnum is an interesting soul not developed enough. But the dynamic of Kaluuya and Palmer power “Nope” just as much as the overarching mysteries.

OJ is a laconic sort yearning to keep his family’s legacy going, Emerald sees the ranch as low priority on her list of side hustles, yet both grow on you in their slow-burn reconnection. Palmer especially is a fountain of magnetic energy, and Kaluuya, like usual, leaves his heart right on screen. He also gets one of the most sensational little moments, in a scene that essentially gives the movie its whimsical title.

With "Nope," Peele showcases a new sense of blockbuster flair while maintaining his signature gift for twisted modern relevance.

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Jordan Peele’s Nope, explained

Unpacking the spectacle at the heart of the movie’s mysteries.

by Alissa Wilkinson

A man in a cowboy hat gestures toward the sky.

It’s gutsy to start a movie with a verse from Nahum, which is surely one of the Bible’s least-quoted books. But Jordan Peele likes a challenge.

So the text that opens Nope , the director’s follow-up to Us and Get Out , is Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle. Buckle up!

Nope is a bloody, creepy UFO movie, unexpectedly gross in spots, with several different ideas knocking around in its head. Since the relatively straightforward Get Out , Peele’s work has moved away from simple explanation and toward discomfiting vibes, and that’s to its credit.

But that means audiences have to lean in and work harder, and have to be okay with mystery. That helps explain why some viewers may come away dissatisfied. TV and movies over the past several decades have coaxed us to expect explanations and puzzle boxes in our entertainment, and to be annoyed when creators refuse to reveal the trick at the end of the show. But Peele is happy to leave some things to our imaginations.

Which includes his gutsy epigraph. Nahum is one of the “minor” prophets of the Bible (which basically means the book he wrote is short), nestled in between Jonah — the guy who was swallowed up by a giant fish — and Zephaniah, who like Nahum mainly foretold destruction . The target of all three was Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which did indeed fall not long after the prophecies, taking the empire down with it. Just before this verse, Nahum describes Nineveh as a lion’s den, the “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims,” a place with “galloping horses and jolting chariots,” full of bodies of the dead. Basically, Nineveh arrogantly chews people up and spits them out. So, Nahum says, God will do the same to Nineveh.

A man stands with a horse, a woman in front of him, and a green screen behind them.

Nope is not set in Nineveh, exactly; it’s set in Hollywood. The action takes place in Agua Dulce, about a 40-mile drive north of Hollywood. There, siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, named for their great-great-great grandfather Alistair E. Haywood, who rode the horse in the first moving picture ever made . They train horses for movies. But following the untimely death of their father Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David), killed in a freak accident in which debris rained down from the sky, they’re running into hard times. Plus, the advent of CGI means the movies just don’t require real horses on set the way they used to.

Alistair Haywood’s character is Peele’s invention, though the film in which he rode a horse, made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, is real. Actually, there were multiple films; the one that Peele intertwines Nope with involves a horse named Annie G. ridden by an unidentified but definitely Black jockey. History remembers the horse but has lost track of the jockey’s identity , which is sort of Nope ’s point. In one scene, Emerald proudly announces on a movie set that “since the moment pictures could move, we got skin in the game.” But nobody remembers Haywood unless she reminds them.

In any case, the Haywood ranch is just up the road from Jupiter’s Claim, and OJ’s been selling horses to owner Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) to keep the ranch afloat. Jupiter’s Claim is a goofy cartoonish amusement park lightly modeled on a fun-loving town from some old Western — and those in turn, let’s remember, were very lightly modeled on the actual West. Jupe, a former child star, picked up his nickname from his role as “Jupiter” on Kid Sheriff , a movie he starred in following a rather sudden end to a short-lived sitcom, Gordy’s Home . He now sustains a living chasing that fame any way he can: selling access to memorabilia, attracting tourists to Jupiter’s Claim, starring in reality shows with his family, and some … weirder pursuits.

But that’s in keeping with Agua Dulce, because there’s been a lot of weird stuff going on in the six months since Otis died. Electricity randomly browns out and audio slows down at nighttime, and the laws of physics occasionally behave strangely. And there’s something in the sky.

Yes, this is a UFO movie, or a “UAP” movie, since — as local electronics wiz and alien aficionado Angel (Brandon Perea) tells Emerald — the government switched to calling them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena after they “declassified all that alien shit years ago.” Call them what you want: Flying saucers in movies are often metaphors for invasion by unknown forces, or for paranoia that the government is keeping secrets from its people.

Peele knows all this, but with Nope , he isn’t doing pure homage. Instead, he scatters breadcrumbs along the way to his main point. This is partly a film about how frequently Black film history has been pushed out of memory. In the ranch house, you can glimpse posters for the films Duel at Diablo and Buck and the Preacher , the first Westerns that Sidney Poitier starred in and directed, respectively, in 1966 and 1972. Buck and the Preacher , in particular, was groundbreaking for casting Black actors as main characters. Coupled with the Haywood connection — and the fact that it’s still hard, 50 years later, to get a movie made starring Black actors that isn’t about trauma in some way — Nope points to Hollywood’s history of shoving inconvenient histories aside.

Image reads “spoilers below,” with a triangular sign bearing an exclamation point.

But that’s not all that’s going on here. Nope is centrally about how our experiences of reality have been almost entirely colonized by screens and cameras and entertainment’s portrayals of what it calls reality, to the point that we can barely conceive of experiencing reality directly, with honesty and without any kind of manipulation. It’s as if it sprung from the mind of any number of theorists, like Guy Debord, the philosopher who in 1967 wrote a book called Society of the Spectacle . “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail,” Debord wrote, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

In his treatise, Debord goes on to posit that “the spectacle” — which he describes as sort of an all-consuming blanket of unreality that attracts our gaze and replaces our reality — more or less has colonized modern life. Our social life is not about living, but having.

And that’s all over Nope, from start to finish. Jupe’s offices are lined with posters commemorating TV and film history, from his earliest work all the way to an upcoming family reality show, all designed to keep eyes on him. He’s been courting the flying saucer, whatever it is, since its appearance six months ago, using Haywood’s horses to do so. And while he harbors a painfully traumatic memory of a chimp attack on the set of the short-lived Gordy’s Home , he can’t access it directly when explaining to Emerald and OJ; he recounts a Saturday Night Live sketch about it instead.

Jupe’s development of a “family show” at Jupiter’s Claim is just another harnessing of spectacle — in this case, the flying saucer — to get paying customers to his amusement park. He calls the unknowable creatures he believes are on board the saucer “The Viewers.” They are watching us , he thinks, unable to think of himself outside that paradigm. To be alive is to be watched, he believes. It’s when people stop watching you that you cease to exist.

Watching and being watched is everywhere in Nope . When OJ and Emerald first come to believe there’s a saucer in the sky, they head straight for the electronics store to get surveillance cameras, which Angel installs on their property. Angel, besotted with aliens because of TV (“Ancient Aliens, History Channel — watch that shit,” he tells them), rigs up a remote connection so he can watch at night from the electronics store. It’s like TV, till it’s real. The first night, as OJ dodges the saucer, a nearby coworker in the store, munching chips and hanging out, even breathlessly asks, “What happened to OJ?” As if he’s a character on a show, and not a real guy whose life is in danger.

An object that looks like a flying saucer!

OJ isn’t much for technology; unlike smartphone-toting Emerald, he still uses a flip phone, a clear sign that he doesn’t want to participate in this spectacle culture. When it comes for him, he knows not to look. He opts out. (Nope.)

But you can’t really opt out of a spectacle culture — it’s around you, and whether or not you want to participate, it tends to suck you in anyhow. When OJ and Emerald realize there’s some kind of a flying saucer in the sky, their first impulse is to film it, to own a representation of it. That’s not without reason, since they’ve grown up knowing that their family’s place in Hollywood history was essentially stolen from them by those more interested in the horse’s name than in Haywood’s. But their urge to get “the impossible shot” is greater than their urge to run away from the danger itself.

Yet it might help to explain why OJ is the first to realize that the saucer isn’t a saucer at all, at least not like the kind they’re used to seeing in the movies. It wasn’t crazy to assume the object in the sky was a ship carrying aliens. Many of the things we believe about the world around us and about our history come from representations of them on screens, not reality. (Debord again.) Our ideas of what war is like, what cities are like, what love is like, how the West was “won” — they all come through movies. They have since the pictures started moving, as Emerald puts it.

And as time has gone on, we’ve grown more hungry for bigger, better representations. The mirror ball that spooks the horse on set is a VFX ball , a key tool for digital video artists in making today’s spectacle-driven CGI blockbusters.

Why visual effects artists love this shiny ball

Which is why it matters what we see. But OJ gets it: the saucer is alive, and it isn’t trying to help them or study them or warn them. It just wants to eat them. It’s less saucer than spectacle to gawk at. And it has a screen-shaped rectangle at its heart which, as we see at the start of the movie, contains Muybridge’s film of Haywood riding the horse. But it’s insatiable. It wants blood. The spectacle consumes all.

There are other deliciously unexplained breadcrumbs scattered throughout Nope , which could be clues or references or just delightful red herrings. There’s a tiny reference to Poltergeist when the alien arrives. There’s also a tennis shoe that balances on its heel, for no apparent reason, during Gordy’s on-set rampage; it later shows up in Jupe’s back room of memorabilia. The name of the TMZ reporter who shows up on a motorcycle — with a mirrored helmet, no less — is listed in the film’s credits as “Ryder Muybridge,” which is obviously a reference to the man who shot the film starring Alistair Haywood and who has gone down in history with all the credit. (Emerald is desperate that he not steal their impossible shot.)

In the end, of course, there’s a great irony to Nope , and one of which Peele is undoubtedly aware; he ends the film, after all, with the “impossible shot” being captured as a still by an old-fashioned film camera. (Which is not a guarantee that they’ll be believed — you can fake a photo, right?) Nope is a big, very loud, very effects-driven spectacle. It’s a movie with a thousand references to the past. It’s also a riotously entertaining thrill ride that owes portions of its plot to some of Hollywood’s most successful summer blockbusters, Jaws and Independence Day . It’s part of the culture; it can’t stand outside of it.

But it functions at least a little bit as a warning, or maybe a prophecy, or a call for a reboot, or a reminder to care about what, or who, gets our attention. When midway through the film, the saucer rains guts and blood down on the ranch house, you have to think of Nahum’s words: “I will cast abominable filth upon you.”

A culture built on spectacle can only get more spectacular, coaxing us to always look at it, to never tear ourselves away, to gorge ourselves on it. The impossible trick is to just say nope.

Nope is playing in theaters beginning July 21.

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35 must-see movie directors

The ultimate collection of legends who ever sat behind a camera

Making movies is an art form built on collaboration. A single movie takes armies of talented artisans to turn cinematic dreams into reality. But when it comes down to it, it's the one who says "Action!" who quite literally gets the cameras rolling. But with so many directors to have lived and died in the history of movies, which filmmakers are actually deserving of "must-see" status?

Believe it or not, the history of directors hasn't always been so clear-cut. In a nutshell, the job of a director was figured out several years into the birth of the industry, when filmmakers recognized there had to be someone coordinating between the actors, designers, and technicians. By the 1920s, the emerging class of film criticism saw directors as the single "author" of a movie, with early reviews attributing the success or failure of movies to the one whose name came after the words "Directed by."

Some of the most prominent directors in the first years of the movie industry include Georges Méliès, D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Sergei Eisenstein. But who else since them are directors of mandatory recognition? These are just 35 must-see directors you need to know about.

35. Antoine Fuqua

One of many Hollywood directors to cut their teeth in the world of music videos, Antoine Fuqua made his feature directing debut with the 1998 action thriller The Replacement Killers. Between his critically acclaimed Training Day (2001) and box office hits like Olympus Has Fallen and The Equalizer trilogy, Fuqua's name is synonymous with a particular vibe of modern day Hollywood that never ceases to draw audiences.

34. John Cassavettes

An actor before he became a pioneer in American independent cinema, John Cassavettes is remembered for his string of acclaimed movies that altogether rejected Hollywood standards and formalization. Starting with Shadows in 1959, Cassavettes' cemented his place in the art and culture of movies with dramas and comedies like Faces (1968), Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Gloria (1980) and more.

33. Nancy Meyers

Originally a screenwriter of movies like Father of the Bride (1991), Nancy Meyers has since become one of the most commercially successful female directors in Hollywood history. Her canon of upbeat romantic comedies, like What Women Want (2000), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), and It's Complicated (2009) have become foundational to millennial pop culture. As an artist, Meyers is known for her elaborate sets (usually luxurious aspirational homes) and a distinct female gaze through which her characters see their worlds.

32. Luca Guadagnino

An Italian import known for elaborate visual compositions and complex characters, Luca Guadagnino made his cinematic debut with The Protagonists in 1999. After the acclaim of his "Desire" trilogy - made up of movies like I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015), and Call Me By Your Name (2017) - Guadagnino expanded into genres like horror, such as his 2018 remake of Suspiria and his 2022 cannibal romance Bones and All. He received commercial and critical success with his 2024 erotic sports drama Challengers.

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31. Terrence Malick

A polarizing filmmaker known for his dreamlike aesthetics and spiritual themes, Terrence Malick's career spans several decades. He made his filmmaking debut with Badlands in 1973, in which Sissy Spacek plays a teenager who goes on a violent crime spree with her lover (played by Martin Sheen). After 1978's Days of Heaven, Malick went on a long hiatus, retreating from the public eye to write screenplays in Paris. In 1997, he returned with The Thin Red Line. He followed it up with movies like The New World (2005), To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), and A Hidden Life (2019).

30. Justin Lin

A Taiwanese American filmmaker, Justin Lin is one of the most bankable action directors in modern Hollywood with films that have collectively grossed billions worldwide. After financing his first two movies Shopping For Fangs (1997) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) on maxed-out credit cards and his emptied life savings, Lin graduated to a whole new level with The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006. He continued revving up Hollywood with several Fast & Furious sequels, including the box office hits Fast Five (2011) and Fast & Furious 6 (2013), as well as Star Trek Beyond (2016), the third installment in Paramount's Star Trek film series.

29. Sidney Lumet

Before his death in 2011, Sidney Lumet was a renowned filmmaker behind some of the most acclaimed classics in American cinema. Originating in the world of theater, Lumet helmed movies characterized by grit and grime, with themes and subjects focused on class inequality and social injustice. He won the Oscar for Best Director four times, for his movies 12 Angry Men (1957), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and The Verdict (1982). His other movies include A View From the Bridge (1962), Serpico (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and more. His last movie was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, released in 2007.

28. John Carpenter

A titan of horror cinema, John Carpenter is one of the few filmmakers to direct and score his movies; his synthesizer soundtracks are foundational to the retrowave genre. After his first two features - Dark Star (1974) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) - Carpenter changed horror pop culture with 1978's Halloween, the first in the hit franchise. His other movies, like Escape From New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Christine (1984), Big Trouble in Little China (1987), and They Live (1988) are considered classics of '80s horror cinema.

27. Ava DuVernay

After working as a journalist (including covering the O.J. Simpson trial) and publicist for Hollywood studios, Ava DuVernay eventually heeded the call to tell her own stories. Following her narrative film debut I Will Follow (2010) and her acclaimed sophomore movie Middle of Nowhere (2012), Ava DuVernay won widespread recognition with her historical drama Selma, about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s march from Selma to Montgomery during the Civil Rights Movement. Two years later, she returned to documentary filmmaking with her must-see feature 13th, analyzing the disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. After, DuVernay expanded into TV, and also helmed the big budget sci-fi A Wrinkle in Time for Disney .

26. Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard wasn't the only director of the radical French New Wave movement; Francois Truffaut and Jacques Demy say bonjour. But Godard is easily its most prolific representative, with a vast collection of celebrated films including a whopping 16 movies (both features and shorts) in the 1960s alone. After his celebrated debut Breathless in 1960, Godard established his artistry with pictures like The Little Soldier (1963), Pierrot Le Fou (1965), and La Chinoise (1967). Impressively, Godard made films even long after the French New Wave rolled back; his last film was The Image Book, released in 2018. His last short, Scénarios , was released posthumously in 2024, two years after his death in 2022 at age 91.

25. Akira Kurosawa

Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of global cinema, Akira Kurosawa's 30 films across five decades have played a huge influence over other directors like George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Zack Snyder . While he is best known for period samurai epics like Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), and Yojimbo (1961), Kurosawa's main concern was Japan itself, and how its postwar environment was rapidly transforming society.

24. Jane Campion

One of the few female directors in history to be nominated multiple times for the Best Director Oscar, Jane Campion's movies center on seduction and female power that debatably stretch beyond basic feminist labels. After her filmmaking debut with the TV film Two Friends in 1986, Campion won acclaim for The Piano in 1993. She spent the '90s and 2000s making films like The Portrait of a Lady (1996), In the Cut (2003), and Bright Star (2009). In 2021, she won acclaim for her dark Western epic The Power of the Dog, for which she won her second Oscar for Best Director.

23. Kathryn Bigelow

One of Kathryn Bigelow's first movies, the short film The Set-Up, portrays two men actually beating each other up for real, while two semioticians analyze the images in voice-over. It's a succinct summary of her career for the next several decades, being one of the few female directors of action movies at the Hollywood studio level. After her feature debut The Loveless in 1981, Bigelow found huge success with her adrenaline-fueled crime thriller Point Break in 1991. In 2008, she won acclaim for her high-wire Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker, as well as 2012's Zero Dark Thirty that recreated the lead-up to, and assassination of, terrorist Osama bin Laden.

22. Takashi Miike

An iconoclast director who rose from the Japanese underground to direct big budget spectacles, Takashi Miike is known for his hyper-violence and gonzo sensibilities. He made several films in his native Japan throughout the 1990s before finding worldwide infamy with Audition in 1999. In 2001, his film Ichi the Killer drew controversy for its stomach-churning gore. Despite his off-putting taste, Miike has found mainstream success, with his acclaimed samurai epic 13 Assassins (2010) and other studio fare like Yatterman (2009), Ace Attorney (2012), and Blade of the Immortal (2017).

21. David Fincher

Characterized by extreme preparation and maddening specificity, the results of David Fincher's work speak for itself, with his movies making up some of the most celebrated works of mainstream art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. After making his debut with Alien 3 in 1992, Fincher wowed the industry with his troubling but perfect psychological thriller Seven in 1995. He kept raising the bar for filmmakers everywhere, with meticulously crafted thrillers like The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999), Zodiac (2007), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Gone Girl (2014), and The Killer (2023). His 2010 drama The Social Network, about the creation of Facebook, is easily one of the most consequential and influential movies of all time, responsible in part for shaping the arrogance of the technology sector throughout the 2010s.

20. Stanley Kubrick

A filmmaker remembered for his exhaustive perfectionism, Stanley Kubrick arose toward the end of the original Hollywood golden age with his first film The Killing in 1956. After leaving the U.S. for the UK in the 1960s, he directed movies like Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), all of which have been wildly influential in art and culture. His movies in the '70s and '80s have been equally formative, including A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). He died only a few weeks after completing his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, in 1999.

19. The Wachowskis

One of the most prolific trans directors in Hollywood history, the Wachowskis first emerged as writers on the movie Assassins, which was helmed by director Richard Donner. The script was heavily rewritten to the point the Wachowskis tried, and failed, to get their names removed. From that moment they decided to become directors. After their 1996 neo-noir Bound, they changed action blockbusters forever with their revolutionary epic The Matrix in 1999. The two kept pursuing ambitious science fiction filmmaking including Speed Racer (2008), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Jupiter Ascending (2015). In 2021, Lana Wachowski alone helmed the highly anticipated fourth Matrix film, The Matrix Resurrections.

18. John Hughes

Few directors, living or dead, harnessed the messiness of youth like John Hughes. Originating as a writer for National Lampoon, John Hughes went on to direct seminal teen movies like Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Towards the late '80s, Hughes began moving away from teen movies - like with the '87 comedy Planes, Trains, and Automobiles - and wrote other classics like Pretty in Pink and Home Alone. By the mid '90s, Hughes had totally withdrawn from public life. He died in 2009.

17. Satoshi Kon

The Japanese animation industry has no shortage of prolific directors, like Hayao Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno. But Satoshi Kon is singular. Until his death in 2010, Satoshi Kon rewrote the playbook on animation filmmaking with a series of acclaimed pictures, like his psychological thriller Perfect Blue (1997), Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003), and Paprika (2006). Despite a very short filmography, Satoshi Kon's work is renowned for his mixture of realistic visual expression and dreamlike editing. His work has influenced other major filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan.

16. Jordan Peele

Originating as one half of the sketch comedy duo Key & Peele (with creative partner Keegan Michael-Key), Jordan Peele has quickly established himself a horror auteur of renown. Starting with his modest budget horror Get Out (2017) - a gripping fusion of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? with Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Peele has since helmed transfixing sci-fi horror films like Us (2019), which plays into ancient doppelganger myths, and Nope (2022), an alien invasion horror about Hollywood traumas and man's arrogance to dominate over nature.

15. Guillermo del Toro

No one loves monsters like Guillermo del Toro. A celebrated Mexican filmmaker who wears his fairy tale and genre influences on his sleeves, Guillermo del Toro's movies often feature elements of the supernatural (including and especially otherworldly creatures), undertones of Catholicism, and political anti-fascism. After his directing debut Cronos in 1993, del Toro eventually elevated to studio filmmaking with comic book adaptations Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004). In 2006, he won acclaim for his Spanish-language fantasia Pan's Labyrinth. His other movies include the mech blockbuster Pacific Rim (2013), the gothic horror Crimson Peak (2015), his Oscar-winning romance The Shape of Water (2017), and his breathtaking stop-motion animation Pinocchio (2022).

14. James Cameron

He's behind some of the biggest movies of all time, no question. With an adventurer's spirit who finds new depths to his craft, James Cameron frequently explores the cutting-edge of cinema to break box office records. After his critical and commercial acclaim from The Terminator in 1984, Cameron asserted his dominance with action-oriented hits like Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), True Lies (1994), and his iceberg-sized Titanic (1997). In 2009, Cameron unleashed Avatar (2009), one of the biggest movies of all time. It was only matched by none other than his 2022 sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water.

13. Nora Ephron

A prolific director who shaped the modern romantic comedy, Nora Ephron made audiences fall in love with characters with big hearts on the big screen. A journalist and author before she sat behind the camera, Ephron first wrote screenplays for movies like Silkwood (1983), Heartburn (1986) - which was based on her own semi-autobiographical novel - and When Harry Met Sally.. (1989). In 1993, she directed Sleepless in Seattle, which was a major critical and commercial hit. Her last movie was Julie & Julia (2009), released just a few years before her death in 2012.

12. Wong Kar-wai

Beloved for his deeply romantic artistry, Wong Kar-wai's movies pulsate with bold colors and passionate atmospherics. Born in Shanghai, Wong Kar-wai established his career in Hong Kong, starting with his directorial debut As Tears Go By (1988). Though crime and action movies were in vogue, Wong Kar-wai consciously zigged from the zag to direct more intimate romantic pictures, like Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and Happy Together. He won critical acclaim for his 2000 feature In the Mood for Love. In 2013, he directed the martial arts biopic The Grandmaster.

11. Kevin Smith

A film school dropout from New Jersey, Kevin Smith earned acclaim for his indie hit Clerks, filmed inside the real convenience store where he worked part-time, in 1994. Its unlikely success birthed Smith's own original cinematic universe - made up of comedies like Mallrats (1996), Chasing Amy (1997), and Dogma (1999) - all featuring foul-mouthed Jersey slackers, notably the nomadic observers Jay and Silent Bob. Starting in 2011, Smith swerved into the horror genre with movies like Red State, (2014) and Yoga Hosers (2016).

10. Agnès Varda

Posthumously described by Martin Scorsese as "one of the Gods of cinema," Agnes Varda first studied and worked as a photographer before transitioning to movies. Though her career began before the French New Wave, her artistic sensibilities align with the movement's principles and aesthetics. Her debut was the film Le Pointe Courte, released in 1955. Her other movies include Le Bonheur (1965), Lions Love (1969), Mur Murs (1981), and Kung Fu Master (1988).

9. Robert Eggers

Characterized by his love for fairytales and folktales, Robert Eggers made his first movie, the 2015 horror The Witch, after a career as a designer and director of theater in New York. The movie not only launched Anya Taylor-Joy to stardom, but also cemented Eggers as a singular artist of meticulously designed horror. In 2019 he directed the eldritch horror The Lighthouse, and in 2022 helmed the Viking epic The Northman.

8. Park Chan-wook

One of the most celebrated directors of Korean New Wave cinema, Park Chan-work came to prominence with his third film Joint Security Area (2000), a politically-charged drama that became South Korea's highest-grossing film at the time of its release. Armed with creative freedom, he embarked on an anthology trilogy of movies themed after revenge, with the 2003 picture Oldboy its most revered. His other movies include the sci-fi rom-com I'm a Cyborg But That's OK (2006), the romantic horror Thirst (2009), and his erotic noir Decision to Leave (2022). In 2013, he made his English film debut with Stoker, starring Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman.

7. John Woo

A major figure of the heroic bloodshed era of Hong Kong cinema, John Woo nearly quit filmmaking after a string of disappointments. In 1986, he finally saw through his dream movie A Better Tomorrow, which not only exploded Chow Yun-fat to stardom but also Woo himself. After the sequel A Better Tomorrow II in 1987, Woo elevated action filmmaking with game-changing hits like The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), and Hard Boiled (1992). Woo spent the rest of the '90s in Hollywood, helming hits like Hard Target (1993), Face/Off (1997), and Mission: Impossible II (2002). Woo returned to Hollywood with his Christmas action movie Silent Night in 2023.

6. Quentin Tarantino

The words printed on Jules' wallet in Pulp Fiction can also describe the one and only Quentin Tarantino. Raised by a mother who permitted him to see mature movies and having spent several years working at a California video store, Quentin Tarantino first wrote screenplays, including what would become his breakout movie Reservoir Dogs, which he directed in 1992. With his next movie, Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was elevated to auteur status and took home an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. His other movies include Jackie Brown (1997), the Kill Bill duology (2003-2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

5. Francis Ford Coppola

A leading figure of the New Hollywood movement of the '60s and '70s, Francis Ford Coppola earned immortality with his 1972 epic The Godfather. He spent the rest of the 1970s making more unimpeachable classics like The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, the latter of which remains infamous for its troubled production. In the 1980s, Coppola diversified his output to focus on youth-oriented dramas like The Outsiders and romantic comedy Peggy Sue Got Married. While Coppola slowed down considerably in the 21st century, his ambitious science fiction epic Megalopolis drew divisive reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival.

4. Christopher Nolan

A master filmmaker concerned with the intricacies of time, space, and love, Christopher Nolan is one of the few true auteurs of the 21st century whose name alone draws crowds. Starting with his humble psychological thriller Following in 1998, Christopher Nolan unleashed two more dark movies in the same vein - Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2002) - before changing the superhero genre forever with his 2005 blockbuster Batman Begins. His "Dark Knight" trilogy made him a household name that audiences flocked to his more puzzling features like Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017); his sci-fi Tenet might have drawn as many had it not been during a pandemic. In 2023, Nolan again took over the box office with his biographical masterpiece Oppenheimer, unofficially one-half of the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon.

3. Spike Lee

A singular filmmaker with knife-sharp observations about American politics and the Black American experience, Spike Lee is compelling even when his movies fall short. A proud son of New York who is at home at Knicks games as he is behind the camera, Lee made his feature debut with She's Gotta Have It, a multi-dimensional portrait of contemporary relationships. He drew more acclaim with his socially conscious 1989 drama Do the Right Thing. His other acclaimed movies include Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Clockers (1995), Summer of Sam (1999), 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), Miracle at St. Anna (2008), Chi-Raq (2015), BlacKkKlansman (2018), and Da 5 Bloods (2020).

2. Martin Scorsese

There is maybe no one on Earth, living or dead, who loves the art and culture of cinema like Martin Scorsese. A director, writer, and historian with a career spanning five decades, Scorsese's works, often but not always gangster epics, are practically synonymous with American cinema. After his debut with the 1967 movie Who's That Knocking at My Door, Scorsese arose in the 1970s and 1980s with classics like Mean Streets (1973), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese simply never faltered in his game, with his output between the 1990s and 2020s full of outsized epics, like Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), The Wolf of Wall Street 2013), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

1. Steven Spielberg

A towering Hollywood artist whose films wholly define American cinema, Steven Spielberg spans as many genres as he does decades. Starting with his theatrical film debut The Sugarland Express in 1974, Spielberg catapulted to immortality with his 1975 summer horror Jaws. While many of his movies of this era concerned genres like sci-fi and pulp adventure, including the influential Indiana Jones series, Spielberg eventually found his way to grounded human stories with features like The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), and Schindler's List (1993). With even more revered pictures across the late 20th and 21st century, Spielberg, there is simply no one deserving of proper recognition as one of the greatest movie artists who ever lived than the one who taught us that movies are an invitation to adventure.

Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he's your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.

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COMMENTS

Nope movie review & film summary (2022)
It's surprising how little information about writer/director Jordan Peele's "Nope" has leaked since it was first announced. There have been a few trailers that show what may or may not be the film's primary threat, and the marketing team has done a very good job with posters of its main cast members looking up at the sky and uttering the film's title.
Nope
Rated 3.5/5 Stars • Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 04/07/23 Full Review Brandon Richardson Jordan Peele has done it again with another phenomenal horror movie that's both scary and thoughtful. It ...
Review: Jordan Peele's 'Nope' Gets a Hell Yes
The trailers for Jordan Peele's "Nope," one of the most feverishly anticipated movies of the summer, have raised some intriguing questions. ... Peele's movie love runs wide and deep ...
'Nope' Review: Jordan Peele's Rapturous and Suspenseful Sci-Fi Ride
Release date: Friday, July 22 (Universal) Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David. Director-screenwriter: Jordan Peele. Rated R, 2 hours 15 ...
Nope (2022)
Nope: Directed by Jordan Peele. With Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott. The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.
Nope Review: A Glorious Spectacle Packed With Too Many Ideas
Jordan Peele's latest sci-fi horror movie 'Nope' is enjoyable as a spectacle, but conceptually it comes off as barely thought through.
Nope review: New Jordan Peele movie is subversive sci-fi update
Nope review: Space is the place in Jordan Peele's subversive sci-fi update. Don't look up: The fertile mind behind Get Out and Us explores unfriendly skies — and more earthbound threats — in ...
Jordan Peele's Nope review: a breathtaking celebration of filmmaking
Jordan Peele's Nope — in theaters July 22nd — isn't just another sci-fi thriller; it's a genre-bending meta-narrative about the agony and ecstasy of filmmaking.
Nope Review: Jordan Peele Is at His Most Ambitious and Hilarious
RELATED: First 'Nope' Reactions Call Jordan Peele's Movie Indescribable, Divisive, and Terrifying Stylistically, Nope feels in line with other iconic director's third theatrical films, like ...
Nope
Jordan Peele's third film captures the terrible beauty of our endless fascination with events no matter how horrific. Full Review | Oct 4, 2023. Jeffrey Peterson Naija Nerds. Nope, Peele's ...
Nope Review
Jordan Peele's Nope is a bleak, hilarious sci-fi-horror romp, and one of the most entertaining summer movies in years.
'Nope' review: Jordan Peele's thriller forces us to look up
Review: Say yup to Jordan Peele's 'Nope,' the rare thriller Hollywood can look up to. Keke Palmer in the movie "Nope.". Given all the surreally unnerving sights there are to see in ...
Nope, review
Nope. And for proof, see Nope, Peele's most supersized movie yet. Consider the prologue. Stanley Kubrick opened 2001 with primal apes about to evolve into humans. Peele begins his space odyssey ...
Nope movie review: Jordan Peele's third film is funny, weird as hell
Rather, Peele's innate understanding of cinematic history, which may have come from his years of lampooning movie tropes on the sketch show Key & Peele, only provides the foundations. Nope is ...
'Nope' spoiler-free review: Jordan Peele returns to rain down terror
Thanks to Jordan Peele, you're never going to look at the sky the same way again. As teased in the haunting promotional poster for Nope, the supernatural horror at the center of the heralded ...
Jordan Peele's 'Nope,' reviewed : NPR
Jordan Peele subverts expectations (again) with 'Nope'. Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope. When the first trailer for Nope dropped, viewers almost immediately swarmed social ...
'Nope' Review: Jordan Peele Invades the Western
Early in Nope, Jordan Peele's thrilling new horror movie, a woman named Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) tells a story.She and her brother OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) are horse handlers and ranch owners by ...
'Nope' review: say yes to Jordan Peele's genre-hopping horror
There's something pleasingly off-kilter about the way Nope hops between genres. It's often very funny, but not exactly a comedy; it induces shivers of fear without tilting all the way into ...
Review: 'Nope' Rightly Challenges Our Love of Spectacle
It's a necessary if brutal telling, of course, given that Ricky is Peele's true cipher to the film's tentpole themes around fame and the horror of looking. But Nope is no horror Rorschach ...
Nope Review
Release Date: 22 Jul 2022. Original Title: Nope. It's often said that showbiz can eat you alive. Jordan Peele 's third film runs with that metaphor further than anyone might have expected. For ...
'Nope' review: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer fuel Jordan Peele UFO flick
2:11. Yep, it was a good idea for Jordan Peele to have the keys to a flying saucer movie. The subtly ambitious "Nope" (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) trades the writer ...
Nope (film)
Nope (stylized in all caps) is a 2022 American Western science fiction horror film written, directed, and produced by Jordan Peele, under his and Ian Cooper's Monkeypaw Productions banner. It stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as horse-wrangling siblings attempting to capture evidence of an unidentified flying object in Agua Dulce, California.Appearing in supporting roles are Steven Yeun ...
Jordan Peele's Nope, explained
Nope is a bloody, creepy UFO movie, unexpectedly gross in spots, with several different ideas knocking around in its head. Since the relatively straightforward Get Out, Peele's work has moved ...
The Ending of Jordan Peeles Nope Explained
Leave us a nope or yep in the comments. Based on the marketing for "Nope," most audiences will enter the theater expecting an alien invasion movie. Two-thirds into the film, it indeed feels like Jordan Peele has made his answer to "Close Encounters." By the final act, though, "Nope" plays out more like another Spielberg film ...
10 Movies Like 'Nope' for Fans of Jordan Peele
Nope is the third film by critically acclaimed and Oscar-winning director and writer, Jordan Peele. For those unaware, Peele started his career in comedy, but as of 2017, he became a renowned ...
35 must-see movie directors
Originating as one half of the sketch comedy duo Key & Peele (with creative partner Keegan Michael-Key), Jordan Peele has quickly established himself a horror auteur of renown.
Nope
Nope è un film del 2022 scritto e diretto da Jordan Peele. Terza pellicola del regista statunitense , si tratta del primo film del genere horror ad essere stato girato con cineprese IMAX . [ 1 ]

Odie Henderson

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