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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 .

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Nope (2022)

Rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images.

135 minutes

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.

Jordan Peele

Cinematographer

Hoyte van Hoytema
Nicholas Monsour
Michael Abels

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Critic’s Pick

‘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.

Peele’s movie love runs wide and deep. There are sequences here that nod to past masters, from Hitchcock to Spielberg to Shyamalan, and shots that revel in the sheer ecstasy of moviemaking. A sketch-comedy genius before he turned to directing, Peele never takes his performers for granted, giving everyone space to explore quirks and nuances of character. He also shows an appetite, and an impressive knack, for big effects. The climactic scenes aim for — and very nearly achieve — the kind of old-fashioned sublimity that packs wonder, terror and slack-jawed admiration into a single sensation.

Movies can be scary, enchanting, funny and strange. Sometimes they can be all those things at once. What they never are is innocent. While this movie can fairly be described as Spielbergian, it turns on an emphatic and explicit debunking of Spielberg’s most characteristic visual trope: the awe-struck upward gaze .

“Nope” starts with a cautionary text, drawn from the Old Testament Book of Nahum, which describes God’s threatened punishment on the wicked city of Nineveh: “I will make a spectacle of you.” Our beloved spectacles — like most of the other artifacts of our fallen world — are built on cruelty, exploitation and erasure, and “Nope” is partly about how we incorporate knowledge of that fact into our enjoyment of them. In the first scene, a chimpanzee goes berserk on the set of a sitcom, a moment of absurd, bloody terror that becomes a motif and a thematic key. The ape is a wild animal behaving according to its nature even though it has been tamed and trained for human uses.

The same can be said for the horses who serve as Peele’s totems of movie tradition. He invokes what is thought to be the very first moving image, captured by the 19th-century inventor and adventurer Eadweard Muybridge , of a man on horseback. Emerald ( Keke Palmer ) and O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) claim the rider as their ancestor. They honor his legacy by holding onto the business started by their father, Otis Haywood (Keith David), a ranch that supplies horses for television and movies.

O.J. — it’s short for Otis Jr. — is the main wrangler, a laconic, sad-eyed cowboy more comfortable around horses than people. His sister is more outgoing, and one of the offhand delights of “Nope” is how credibly Kaluuya and Palmer convey the prickly understanding that holds siblings together and sometimes threatens to drive them apart.

Strange things are happening on the ranch. The power cuts out, a mysterious cloud lurks on the horizon, and freakish storms drop detritus from the sky. A horse’s flank is pierced by a falling house key, and Otis Sr. takes an improbable projectile in the eye. Is there a flying saucer haunting the valley? Emerald and O.J. suspect as much, and so does their neighbor, an entrepreneur known as Jupe (Steven Yeun) who has turned his corner of the valley into a Wild West-themed tourist trap.

The possible U.F.O. hovers around the edges of the action for a good while, kind of like the shark in “Jaws” — or the spaceship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — adding an element of danger that throws human interactions into comical and dramatic relief. As in “Jaws,” a fractious posse forms to deal with the threat, including Angel (Brandon Perea), an anxious techie, and Antlers (Michael Wincott), a visionary cinematographer who shows up at the ranch with a hand-cranked IMAX camera. Jupe, whose back story as a child actor connects him to that wayward chimp, is a bit like the mayor of Amity — less a villain than the representative of a clueless, self-serving status quo.

He’s also a showman, and as such an avatar of the film’s ambivalence about the business of spectacle. Emerald, O.J., Antlers and Angel, by contrast, are craftspeople, absorbed in matters of technique and concerned with the workaday ethics of image-making. This is the place to note Guillaume Rocheron’s haunting, eye-popping special effects, Hoyte van Hoytema’s lucid-dream cinematography and Nicholas Monsour’s sharp editing, and to encourage you to think about the hard work and deep skill represented by all the names in the final credits.

Peele, of course, is both craftsman and showman. He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism. Instead, he revels in paradoxes. The moral of “Nope” is “look away,” but you can’t take your eyes off it. The title accentuates the negative, but how can you refuse?

Nope Rated R. Scares and swears. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Nope Reviews

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: A | 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

Jordan Peele takes full advantage of Hoyte van Hoytema's phenomenal cinematography and Michael Abels' memorable score to create a spectacle worthy of the big screen, but it's the sound production that really elevates the movie to that level.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 25, 2023

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.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

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.

Damn the white-washed history, and the capitalist traps of Hollywood’s fortune and fame. The beast has no more power here.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

It's a good movie, but perhaps it's time to take some of our bloated expectations off Peele as a filmmaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 16, 2023

The film ultimately spends what feels like an eternity in a climactic and rather confusing confrontation that feels elaborate but fails to ratchet up the tension.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

A sci-fi horror flick that raises some interesting questions about why aliens might come to Earth and what for.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 28, 2023

Director-writer Peele clearly knows the business of suspending disbelief. I say “yup” to ‘Nope.’

Full Review | Original Score: A | Apr 16, 2023

Beneath the interesting and strange tale of aliens and UAPs is Peele shining a bright light from the sky onto Hollywood and American pop culture’s exploitation of Black people and animals.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 7, 2023

There's so much considered detail and nuance that is weaved into these fantastical themes which is bolstered by a lot of the characters taking control of their own narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 23, 2023

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Nope review – Jordan Peele’s brilliantly horrifying ride to nowhere

The director’s elliptical follow-up to Us stars Daniel Kaluuya as a California wrangler defending the family ranch from a deadly threat from above

A t a key moment in this self-consciously deconstructive slice of spectacular cinema from Jordan Peele, writer-director of Get Out and Us , a character theorises that the monster (whatever it may be) is at its most dangerous when being looked at . It’s an idea that’s as old as the Greek myth of Medusa (one gaze will turn you to stone) and that resurfaced in 2018 in Susanne Bier’s post-apocalyptic chiller Bird Box (one look will make you kill yourself). It’s even cheekily echoed in Adam McKay’s recent Don’t Look Up , in which Trumpian politicians insist that destruction-by-comet can be avoided by simply refusing to stare death in the face.

In Nope , horse wrangler/trainer Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr (an understatedly intense Daniel Kaluuya ) tries to dodge the deadly attentions of whatever skybound phenomenon is terrorising his California ranch by studiously avoiding eye contact. OJ’s family, which includes ill-fated father Otis Sr (Keith David) and fame-seeking sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), proudly sell themselves as direct descendants of the unnamed jockey featured in Eadweard Muybridge ’s late 19th-century images of a rider and horse – a precursor of modern cinema (“since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game”). Now the Haywood ranch provides horses for film and TV productions (“the only black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood”), although struggling OJ may have to sell their stock to former child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who runs a nearby theme park. But then mysterious signs in the sky offer either an unexpected opportunity, or a “bad miracle” …

Despite there being extensive spoilers everywhere about what OJ is up against, it’s best to see Nope unprepared and spend a healthy amount of time wondering “WTF is going on?!” Suffice to say that Peele draws on a wide range of influences, from the awestruck human befuddlement of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the eerie, angelic forms of the Japanese TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion , and (accidentally?) the far-too-pleased-with-itself silliness of M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening . He also picks up cine-literate threads from Antonioni’s swinging 60s parable Blow-Up , Sidney Poitier’s 70s western Buck and the Preacher (a poster for which hangs on the ranch wall), Katsuhiro Otomo’s 80s manga Akira (which Peele was once tapped to remake) and even Ron Underwood’s cult desert-bound 90s monster movie Tremors . More importantly, he rips off (or “pays homage to”) the iconic chase sequences from Jaws , with inflatable air dancers standing in for those floating yellow barrels that made Spielberg’s shark all the more terrifying when unseen.

Daniel Kaluuya, Brandon Perea and Keke Palmer in Nope.

From this rich stew, Peele cooks up an elliptical (and sometimes frustratingly paced) yarn about our habit of staring in stupefaction at danger, disaster and trauma. This is hardly news to cinemagoers who have spent a century happily gawping at the fiery wrath of early biblical epics ( Nope opens with an Old Testament threat to “make you a spectacle”) and the modern chaos of disaster hits such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno . More recently we had the end-of-the-world loops of Interstellar , with which this film shares ace director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema, a man who knows about capturing the cataclysmic on screen. Sure enough, the character who most verges on caricature is an eccentric Ahab/Quint-like cinematographer (Michael Wincott) who uses not a harpoon but a hand-cranked camera to “capture” this prize beast after surveillance-cam techie Angel (scene-stealing rising star Brandon Perea) discovers that his quarry eats electricity for breakfast.

There’s a neat irony in conjuring an Imax-friendly essay on the perils of gazing. And beyond the surreal sci-fi spectacles and gorgeously rendered night-time vistas, Nope ’s warnings about enraging an opponent – whether it’s a startled chimp or an amorphous sky blob – by looking it in the eye strike a down-to-earth chord in a racially divided world (perhaps OJ’s adversary is a metaphor for white supremacy?). Yet Peele’s ability to balance these intriguing ideas with the brutally kinetic demands of blockbuster cinema is more uncertain, making this a better movie to argue about than to watch. Remember – Jaws may not have been “about” a shark, but it still moved like one. As with the brilliantly horrifying sitcom bloodbath that serves as Nope ’s attention-grabbing curtain-raiser, the film too often seems to be heading somewhere extraordinary, only to disappear into an ambitious conceptual hole that, while occasionally startling, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

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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 (2022)

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Critics call Jordan Peele's Nope both 'frustratingly perplexing' and 'unquestionable genius'

Either way, you'll probably be squealing "nope!" in the theater.

Whether Nope scratches your itch for quality cinema or simply leaves you scratching your head, critics agree on one thing: Get Out and Us helmer Jordan Peele 's terrifying third feature will likely have you screaming its title out loud in the theater.

Universal largely kept the mysterious project's plot under wraps, but new reviews for the blockbuster horror film shed light on the film's story, which stars Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya as siblings who run a horse-wrangling business that provides livestock to Hollywood productions. Their lives are interrupted by the arrival of an otherworldly presence in the skies above their rural mountain town, with many journalists likening the sense or terror (and awe) to early works by Steven Spielberg.

"Peele has never leaned this close to early Spielberg (or if you're feeling less charitable, mid-period M. Night Shyamalan). His screenplay — threaded through with flashbacks and unhurried character moments — is for a long time a tease, both elliptical and explicit when it comes to the central mystery, though it's clear he's absorbed a lifetime of Close Encounters lore, and much darker visitations too," writes EW's Leah Greenblatt , who concludes that, while the "prevailing mood is a looming, sun-drenched tension," the film's ending "will likely prove less satisfying to a plot-hungry public."

Greenblatt's sentiment is echoed throughout many other mainstream publications, including in Variety writer Owen Gleiberman's take that labels the film a "tantalizingly creepy mixed bag of a sci-fi thriller" that "holds us in a shivery spell," but, in the same vein as Close Encounters , Signs , and Arrival , unspools when it begins revealing its own inner-workings, proving that "anticipation works better than the payoff."

Writing for The Hollywood Reporter , Lovia Gyarkye says that the film "avoids the comfort of tidy conclusions" as an "elusive" project as it indulges "in narrative tangents and detours" that might confuse casual audiences: "It is sprawling and vigorous," she continues. "Depending on your appetite for the heady and sonorous, it will either feel frustratingly perplexing or strike you as a work of unquestionable genius."

In a glowing review, IndieWire 's David Ehrlich heralds the film as a "smart, muscular, and massively entertaining flying saucer freak-out." He says that the film comes fully alive via Hoyte van Hoytema's 65mm cinematography, which lends "the carnage an intergalactic scale that makes even the film's most familiar tropes feel bracingly new, and inspire a degree of holy terror that allows the grand finale to alternate between heart-in-your-throat horror and fistpump-worthy Akira references as cinematography assumes a hands-on roll in the action (Peele keeps the film's self-reflexive streak to a low boil, but cranks it up to a delirious high in the dying minutes.)"

Nope touches down in theaters on Friday. Read on for more critical review excerpts about the film.

Leah Greenblatt ( EW ) "For all of the film's escalating supernatural events, though, what's less clearly drawn, and will likely prove less satisfying to a plot-hungry public, are the whys and hows of its conclusion. Peele's scripts have always felt like meta-text; this one toggles between classic genre stuff and a deliberately fragmented play on certain all-American tropes — flying saucers, sitcoms, jump-scare terror — filtered through a fresh, keenly self-aware lens. As a sci-fi fable, Nope feels both more slippery and less viscerally satisfying than the relatively straightforward horror of Get Out or even 2019's Us , but it still sticks. The truth is out there, or up there, in that curiously immovable cloud that looms like a cotton-ball anvil above the Haywood ranch; it's Peele's prerogative to build his world below it, and leave the rest."

Kambole Campbell ( Empire )

"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 his latest sci-fi horror, Peele characterizes the film industry as a ruthless beast, and wonders about who gets led into its jaws, and for whose benefit. In Nope , the audience itself becomes a vast monster, demanding to be entertained by personal and historical trauma, commodified for their viewing pleasure. The film makes visceral horror of the nightmare of being consumed by something unfathomably larger than you — whether that's by a national audience or a flying Lovecraftian terror. But it's also a celebration of film crew — those in the less glamorous roles fundamental to creating cinematic spectacle."

Siddhant Adlakha ( IGN )

"Equal parts comedic knee-slapper and white-knuckle thriller, Jordan Peele's Nope is a farcical love letter to Hollywood, and to the American dream. It is, at once, a no-frills version of exactly what its trailers are selling — a film about objects falling from the sky, and characters catching glimpses of something sinister in the clouds — and yet, it's entirely unlike its straightforward marketing, which provides hints of plot, but skillfully disguises its tone. It's wonderfully spoiler-proof (though you won't find major details here that haven't already been revealed), in part because it's completely unlike Peele's previous work, both thematically, and in the evolution of his craft."

Owen Gleiberman ( Variety )

"Jordan Peele's Nope is a tantalizingly creepy mixed bag of a sci-fi thriller. It's a movie that taps into our fear and awe of UFOs, and for a while it holds us in a shivery spell. It picks the audience up and carries it along, feeding off spectral hints of the otherworldly. Yet watching the movie, you can just about taste the DNA of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind , and Nope mirrors the trajectory of other films that have been made in the shadow of Close Encounters , like M. Night Shyamalan's Signs and Denis Villeneuve's Arrival . Here, as in those films, the anticipation works better than the payoff."

Lovia Gyarkye ( The Hollywood Reporter )

" Nope , Jordan Peele's latest offering, slinks and slithers from the clutches of snap judgement. 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."

K. Austin Collins ( Rolling Stone )

"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.)"

David Ehrlich ( IndieWire )

"With great patience and tremendous craft, Peele steers these characters (and a handful of others) from one masterful set piece to the next, all of them flecked with popcorn-spilling jolts but more fundamentally driven by a profound sense of big-screen, body-rattling awe. On some level, Nope is Peele's smallest film so far; almost the entire story takes place on the Haywood ranch and its surrounding areas. At the same time, however, it also feels like his largest. Sometimes literally: Hoyte van Hoytema's 65mm compositions lend the carnage an intergalactic scale that makes even the film's most familiar tropes feel bracingly new, and inspire a degree of holy terror that allows the grand finale to alternate between heart-in-your-throat horror and fistpump-worthy Akira references as cinematography assumes a hands-on roll in the action (Peele keeps the film's self-reflexive streak to a low boil, but cranks it up to a delirious high in the dying minutes)."

Ross Bonaime ( Collider )

"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."

Stephanie Zacharek ( TIME )

"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."

Peter Bradshaw ( The Guardian )

"Jordan Peele's strange, muddled, indigestible new UFO mystery looks like it had a good fairy and a dodgy fairy present at the birth. The good fairy is Steven Spielberg, to whose Close Encounters and Jaws the film pays an overt tribute. The dodgy fairy is M. Night Shyamalan, of Signs and The Happening : the sometimes brilliant, sometimes exasperating high-concept showman whose influence is also present – but unacknowledged, un-homaged. It feels like an event movie in the Shyamalan style, all about the prerelease conjecture and trailer buzz: what on earth can it be about?"

Hear more on all of today's must-see picks on EW's What to Watch podcast, hosted by Gerrad Hall.

‘Nope’ Review: Jordan Peele’s UFO Drama Has a Mood of Exciting Unease but an Arbitrary Story

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play horse-ranch siblings who try to photograph a close encounter in a movie that, for all its skillfully ominous atmosphere, begins to fly in all directions.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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NOPE, Keke Palmer, 2022. © Universal Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection

Jordan Peele ’s “ Nope ” is a tantalizingly creepy mixed bag of a sci-fi thriller. It’s a movie that taps into our fear and awe of UFOs, and for a while it holds us in a shivery spell. It picks the audience up and carries it along, feeding off spectral hints of the otherworldly. Yet watching the movie, you can just about taste the DNA of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and “Nope” mirrors the trajectory of other films that have been made in the shadow of “Close Encounters,” like M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.” Here, as in those films, the anticipation works better than the payoff.

Daniel Kaluuya , an actor so skillful he seems to overhaul his spirit with every role, plays the central character, Otis Haywood Jr., a sweet-souled but recessive and taciturn country fellow who goes by the nickname of OJ. Early on, he reunites with his feisty chatterbox sister, Emerald ( Keke Palmer ), on the California horse ranch the two have inherited from their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), who in one of the film’s first scenes dies during a mysterious shower of inanimate debris. For several generations, the ranch has rented out horses to the entertainment industry, with the Haywoods serving as on-set wranglers and horse whisperers. But OJ is looking to sell the business and cash in.

Before he gets the chance, he walks out of the Haywoods’ beautiful farmhouse, stepping into the bright starlit night to chase a horse that has leapt the fence of its training arena. What he sees and hears in the distance is freaky in the extreme: a crowd, lit by floodlights, that seems to have assembled like some outer-space cult. Before long, the signs grow weirder: a cloud that doesn’t move (and hasn’t for weeks). Wind that funnels down into a small tornado. And, finally, a dark svelte object that glides through the air like nothing of this earth. The film’s title plays, amusingly, off that most casual of contempo buzz phrases ( nope! ), and how it perfectly expresses our incredulity in the face of the otherworldly.

Popular on Variety

Of all the fanciful phenomena that rational people claim not to believe in (ghosts, demons, monsters, the theory that Joe Biden stole the election), UFOs hold a special place. Simply put, there’s a lot of evidence for them. I don’t mean the kind of evidence cited by the folks who think that Ed and Lorraine Warren, of the “Conjuring” films, are paranormal documentarians. I’m talking about the mountains of filmed footage of UFOs, a lot of which is fake but not all of it. Of course, just because a flying object is unidentified doesn’t mean that it came from outer space. Yet the best UFO footage, which is available by the clipload on YouTube, exerts an uncanniness that can’t be explained away. You look at caught-on-the-fly images of gliding spacecraft, or lights dancing in the sky, and think, “Wow, what is that? What if ?” Those thoughts have only been encouraged by recent reports leaked by the U.S. government that acknowledge just how many flying objects there are that even military experts can’t identify, some zipping through the air with a technology no one recognizes.

“Nope” has a seductive mood of unease that makes the film feel, for a while, like something new: the first UFO thriller of the cellphone-ready, I-saw-it-online, how-can-you-not-believe-your-own-eyes? era. This is Peele’s third feature, after the landmark racial-paranoia nightmare “Get Out” and the ambitious but muddled doppelgänger fantasy “Us,” and for a while he draws on his skill at leading us down detours that become hypnotic lost highways.

In a way, the whole setup is a bait-and-switch, as Peele lures us into the quirky lives of OJ and Emerald, taking note of the fact that their business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, has deep roots in racial pride. It seems that the Black jockey who appeared for a few seconds in one of history’s earliest film clips was the great-great-grandfather of Otis Sr. (That’s part of their spiel to potential clients.) Kaluuya, so sly, communicating mostly through his sharp gaze, and Palmer, whose fast-break aggro style acquires more heart as the movie goes on, make the Haywoods adult siblings we feel invested in, and the film introduces a couple of other key characters: Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star who now runs a Wild West theme park called Jupiter’s Claim (that’s where the space-cult show was), and Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a techie salesman at Fry’s Electronics who helps the Haywoods set up a surveillance system to record the alien spaceship that appears to have settled in over their property.

It’s a flying saucer that resembles a giant undulating sand dollar, and if you had to use one word to describe it that word would be “hungry.” OJ and Emerald decide to photograph it; if they can land the perfect shot and sell it to the right media source (they have Oprah in mind), it could make them rich. But how do you catch a phantom spaceship on film? You call the jaded analog cinematographer Antlers Holst, played by the veteran croaky-voiced hipster actor Michael Wincott.

As they launch the plan, “Nope” itself starts flying off in different directions. It’s part of the film’s design — and, in a way, its racial consciousness — that OJ and Emerald are too mistrustful of mainstream white society to get any authorities involved. So we’re spared the sort of meddlesome-U.S.-government boilerplate plot that weighed down a movie like “Arrival.” Yet “Nope” doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary fashion. There are memorable touches along the way, like the monster image of a praying mantis on a surveillance camera or, as the electricity goes out, the way Peele slows down Corey Hart’s ’80s kitsch classic “Sunglasses at Night” to evoke the dread of a world stopping in its tracks. Yet for all these suspenseful felicities, logic often takes a back seat, which has the effect of lessening our involvement.

The spaceship, for instance, will suck you into its membrane hole if you look right at it…and sometimes if you don’t. The details of the Haywoods’ strategy to film the thing are never fully sketched in. When Emerald dots the property with inflatable tube men, it makes for a grabby image, but the point of these super-fake decoys is barely established. What’s more, the most disturbing scene in the movie — a flashback to Ricky’s ’90s cable sitcom, which turned into an impromptu horror set when the chimp who played the lovable Gordy went on a bloody rampage — turns out to have nothing to do with…anything. When the spaceship finally unfurls its freak flag, it looks like a pirate galleon made out of a giant ripped bedsheet, which is a little spooky and a little innocuous. “Nope,” like “Signs” and “Arrival,” will probably be a major hit, and it confirms the power of the Jordan Peele brand. But it also confirms that making movies with too much chaos and sprawl is threatening to become part of that brand.

Reviewed at AMC Empire, July 19, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 135 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Monkeypaw Productions production. Producers: Jordan Peele, Ian Cooper. Executive producer: Robert Graf.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Jordan Peele. Camera: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Editor: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.
With: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Keith David, Wrenn Schmidt.

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Jordan Peele subverts expectations (again) with 'Nope'

Aisha Harris

Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope. Universal Studios hide caption

Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope.

When the first trailer for Nope dropped, viewers almost immediately swarmed social media trying to interpret the opaque montage of shots – shots which revealed virtually nothing about the plot of the movie. This is partially of Jordan Peele's own doing, because his first two feature films as a writer-director, Get Out and Us , set up high expectations for twisty, multilayered social commentary by way of popcorn thrills. Even more so it's a product of the current cultural landscape, where seemingly every big movie or TV series is laden with twists and Easter eggs and spoiler-y cameos, lending itself to fervent Reddit threads breaking down the creator's underlying meaning.

Movie Interviews

Jordan peele looked into the mirror and saw the evil inside 'us'.

Code Switch

The horror, the horror: "get out" and the place of race in scary movies.

Peele surely knows by now what audiences anticipate from him and other filmmakers like him, which is probably why – once again – he's managed to subvert our expectations. Nope isn't so much a plot-twisty experience to be meticulously deconstructed as it is a consistently surprising one. It's a journey that's less social commentary-forward than its predecessors, yet still stacked with plenty of meaning to tease out after you've left the theater.

First and foremost, he wants us to be in awe. And on that front, he doesn't disappoint.

The film opens by quoting a Bible verse from the book of Nahum: "I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle," followed by a quiet, eerie scene involving an animal that's best left unsaid for first-time viewers; the better to creep you out in the moment. Eventually, Nope drops us into the world of OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), a pair of siblings dealing with the loss of their father Otis, Sr. (Keith David) while trying to maintain the family business. Haywood Hollywood Horses is their company, a horse wrangling outfit that's worked with TV and film productions for years and is based in the small California desert valley town of Agua Dulce.

Mysterious events and sightings from above begin to occur on the family's ranch, and the hard-hustling Emerald sees an opportunity to make some extra cash by getting the perfect shot of a UFO to sell online. Soon, she and OJ have tricked their land out with camera gear with the help of Angel (Brandon Perea), a tech salesman and quirky supernatural enthusiast who has a plethora of time on his hands. (His actress girlfriend just broke up with him, much to his dismay.) But the UFO poses more of a threat than they initially realize, and soon the three find themselves on the offensive and enlist the help of an old-school filmmaker – the kind who still shoots on actual film – played by Michael Wincott.

Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

Not my job: jordan peele gets quizzed on the teletubbies.

True to Peele's sensibilities, Nope seems to be borrowing from a plethora of cinematic references: Spielberg (particularly Jaws and E.T. ), M. Night Shyamalan ( Signs ), and Alien , just to name a few. Kaluuya plays OJ almost like the strong, silent cowboy heroes of Old Hollywood westerns, a man of few words unless the occasion truly calls for it, and the kind of guy who keeps his feelings close to the vest. This contrasts nicely with Palmer's fast-talking, looser Emerald; she's the firecracker in this powder keg, injecting energy, wit, and comedic relief into a character whose ideas on how to keep the family's legacy alive run up against her brother's intentions.

As the movie trots along, the plot is always a couple steps ahead of where the mind may go, and – at least upon first viewing – not all of the threads necessarily hold together if you think about them for too long. (For instance, a storyline involving Steven Yeun as an amusement park owner and former child star is very effective in echoing the movie's themes, but could also have been more developed.) I also suspect that, like Us , this will stir up a lot of debate about what message Peele might be trying to impart to his audiences, though I'd argue there's less there there to debate over in this case. (On the other hand, maybe that in itself is something to ponder.)

This is not to say Nope is slight; with this movie, he's contributing a new entry to the rich history of Black westerns (the Sidney Poitier-directed Buck and the Preacher is visually referenced, for one) and tapping into themes about a cultural obsession with taming nature and profiting off of pageantry. It's also significant to note how Peele playfully speaks to Black audiences and their frequent responses to horror movies through the clever title and OJ and Emerald's actions – like Regina Hall's ever-skeptical Brenda in the Scary Movie franchise, these characters are wary and smart about situations that are obviously ominous. "Nope" isn't just a phrase, it's a way of survival.

But the aims strongly prioritize thrills and mood-setting. Aesthetically, this is his most ambitious feature yet, with intensely crafted action sequences, breathtaking visuals courtesy of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and a superbly immersive sound design by Johnnie Burn. Peele seems to be having more fun with his audience than ever before as a feature filmmaker, and in turn, it makes for a fun watch.

In an era of sequels, prequels, reboots, and franchises-within-franchises, it's refreshing to see a filmmaker working in this mode, evoking familiarity while keeping viewers on their toes. Nope has only solidified my anticipation for anything and everything Peele does next.

Keke Palmer
Daniel Kaluuya
Jordan Peele

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Nope First Reviews: Ambitious and Well Crafted, but Possibly Jordan Peele's Most Divisive Film Yet

Critics say the writer-directors sci-fi thriller is thought-provoking and confidently made, but its big ideas and cerebral plot may leave general audiences wanting more..

TAGGED AS: aliens , First Reviews , Horror , movies

Nope marks the third feature from writer and director Jordan Peele , and the first reviews of the movie prove that Get Out and Us were no flukes. This time, the filmmaker is focused on a frightening science fiction story involving a horse ranch, a former child actor, and something mysterious lurking above the clouds. Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya , Keke Palmer ,and Steven Yeun within a praised ensemble amidst some spectacular visuals. But whether its script is brilliant or confusing is debated from one review to the next.

Here’s what critics are saying about Nope :

Does Nope confirm Jordan Peele as one of the great directors of our time?

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. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

He continues to be one of the best in the business. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

This film really might be what it takes to etch him as, no, not the next Spielberg, but an event-level filmmaker that we’ve all been worried we were losing. – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

How does it compare to Get Out and Us ?

While still full of profound and layered ideas, Nope is closer in execution to the horror-comedy mix of Get Out than Us . – Ben Kendrick, Screen Rant

Nope is arguably the most conventional horror film of his three directorial efforts. – Matt Rodriguez, Shakefire

Peele’s most assured, confident film yet… Nope may not be Jordan Peele’s best movie to date, but it is his most enjoyable. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

Compared to Get Out and Us , Nope is likely to prove more divisive… I fully expect it to be labeled his strongest and weakest flick in equal measure. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

Peele is capable of doing much better movies (as evidenced by Get Out and Us ), but Nope just looks like a cynical cash grab. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Is it as good as Us and Get Out ? Nope. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

It’s Jordan Peele’s weakest film. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What other movies does it recall?

You can just about taste the DNA of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and… other films that have been made in the shadow of Close Encounters , like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival . – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

What binds this movie so closely to Close Encounters of the Third Kind has less to do with alien visitors, in the end, than with the fervent curiosity that they can inspire. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

It captures the same thrills, tension, and strong characters of movies like Jaws , while also setting itself up to be as iconic as sci-fi movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien . – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

It’s closer to Peele’s Super 8 than Peele’s Signs . – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

This movie reminds me of Tremors … That’s a movie with swagger. And Nope has a similar swagger that Peele was smart to use. – Mike Ryan, Uproxx

The film it most resembled in spirit is a small one, Theo Anthony’s 2021 documentary All Light, Everywhere . – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

But is it also totally original?

Nope is unlike anything you’ve seen before. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

With stunning cinematic moments of pure dread, terror, and wonder, Peele has indeed delivered on his promise to bring audiences something unique. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

This frequently monotonous and unimaginative movie is an unfortunate case of hype over substance. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Is it scary?

The best horror movie of the year… building the tension to the point that it feels as if nowhere is safe. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

Peele is able to create one thrilling, scary scene after another. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

As a horror movie, Nope fails miserably to be frightening. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

How does the movie look?

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema captures something so original visually that it is destined to become iconic. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

Nope mostly delivers in terms of big-screen spectacle, visual oomph… and overdue iconography. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

The movie’s visual effects are adequate but definitely not spectacular for a movie concept of this scope. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Does Nope have a compelling plot?

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

For all of the film’s escalating supernatural events, though, what’s less clearly drawn, and will likely prove less satisfying to a plot-hungry public, are the whys and hows of its conclusion. – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

It’s obvious that writer/director/producer Jordan Peele got this movie made without anyone stepping in to question the very weak and lazy plot of Nope . – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Nope is an idea more than a story. It’s a collection of individually captivating scenes, as opposed to an intriguing whole. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

Is it more cerebral than entertaining?

Nope feels like something of a B-movie ouroboros, an unusually well-made and imaginative thriller that’s sometimes tripped up by its own high-mindedness. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Depending on your appetite for the heady and sonorous, it will either feel frustratingly perplexing or strike you as a work of unquestionable genius. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

It will leave certain viewers more confused than exhilarated. – Ben Kendrick, Screen Rant

Peele’s strength is that he makes you lean in and talk about his film whether you like it or not. – Kathia Woods, Cup of Soul

But does it actually make any sense?

Nope establishes itself as something of an ethically minded Hollywood history lesson, with a particular focus on the industry’s long, brutal record of animal accidents and abuses on set. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Nope gives audiences an unforgettable experience, but forces them to reckon with exactly what types of experiences they really want, and at what cost. – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

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. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Even when parts of it don’t gel, Nope is a rapturous watch. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

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. – Odie Henderson, RogerEbert.com

Does the movie have any other major issues?

Events may happen to OJ and Emerald, but outside of the plot’s story beats, we don’t really know anything about them on an individual level. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

The characters would have benefited from greater depth and dimension. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Peele is far too impressed with its handsomeness to work on populating it with fully felt characters. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

The film’s drawn-out pacing issues… leads to redundant and repetitive events and a comparatively (even compared to Us ) claustrophobic narrative. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Nope opens everywhere on July 22, 2022.

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Nope Rightly Challenges Our Love of Spectacle

OJ Haywood Emerald Haywood and Angel Torres standing in a desert landscape in Nope

Fame eats. It’s a monster. In fact, it’s the ultimate monster in Nope , Jordan Peele ’s full-throttle third feature, a sci-fi western about a mysterious UFO haunting the skies of a sleepy Southern California ranch town. But Nope is not your conventional Peele project. The pursuit and poison of fame are its cardinal fixations. It is a movie squarely concerned with exteriors, one meant to challenge the image-centric culture on which all of us feast.

Where Peele’s movies are typically about journeying into psychological and physical interiors, and the subsequent battle to escape, to shake loose the demons of racism or the plague of exclusion—a la the Sunken Place in Get Out (2017), and the dark rabbit hole from which the Tethered emerged in Us (2019)— Nope is the inverse. Peele suggests that there can be a certain danger in looking. It is a movie that compellingly questions the very line between spectacle and horror, a riddle about the motivations of the sustained gaze and what we stand to lose because of it. Where does one line end and the other begin?

In Nope , Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) is after “the Oprah shot.” She descends from a long line of horse wranglers—“the only Black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood,” as it happens—who were never given proper due. During one gig early on, she details the story of her great-great-great grandfather: He was the jockey captured in the first-ever moving image on camera, “The Horse in Motion,” by Eadweard Muybridge. But like other chapters of Black history, his name was eventually erased, forgotten to time. Thankfully Emerald, along with her brother OJ (Daniel Kaluuya, who plays the role with mesmerizing restraint), refuses to let us forget.

This being a Peele endeavor, the historical snub is used as canny subtext. “We’ve got the first movie star of all time. And it’s a Black man we don’t know,” Peele said in an interview with GQ . “In a lot of ways, the movie became a response to that first film.” As a result, when an alien UFO begins devouring horses on their ranch, getting the shot becomes paramount to all else. With proof of alien life, Emerald and OJ won’t just go viral—the Haywood name will live on forever.

Agua Dulce is the setting for Peele’s tormented wonderland, a breezy desert community and Los Angeles suburb. Agua Dulce is also home to Jupiter’s Claim, the local cowboy-themed amusement park run by Ricky Park (Steven Yuen), a former child TV star. Where Peele is light on the backstory and the granular tensions of the Haywood siblings—a real missed opportunity to grant the movie more complexity—he untangles Ricky’s past with the precision of a trauma surgeon, exposing just how deep the pain goes. A series of gruesome flashbacks reveal Ricky’s pivotal moment of transformation: the day he survived a freak attack by his costar, Gordy the chimpanzee, who went berserk and mauled everyone on set. The incident has a profound impact on the young star; as the proprietor of Jupiter’s Claim, it has conditioned him to exploit horror as a type of showmanship, as genuine prime-time entertainment.

Within the tints of Ricky’s story is one of the more wonderfully complicated interpretations of how celebrity is alchemized and repurposed today. 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.

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But Nope is no horror Rorschach, though it does move with the instincts of one. As scenes swell with chaos, it’s easy to mistake the Haywood home for Hitchcock’s famous Bates Motel. Of course, those stylistic echoes come natural to Peele. A shrewd conductor of the macabre, his movies are best understood in their unraveling, as a kind of funhouse panorama. The ambrosia of suspense is not about what happens but how it happens. The end point is immaterial in Peele’s twisted jamboree of nightmares; the magic manifests en route. It’s why Nope is an ideal canvas not simply to insert Black ways of seeing in historically bereft film genres—Palmer has officially entered Final girl canon!—but as a sharp comment on the toxins of social media, and how it can poison us.

Spectacle captivates, absorbs. It nourishes the need for excitement. But it just as easily swallows whole. The churn of social media has made it such that virality and fame are rewarded at an imbalance—you’re just as likely to see a meme of Usher go viral for its inanity as you are a Black kid get gunned down in his front yard for shock value. “Every animal got rules,” OJ reminds Emerald. Peele understands this, too. In the end, there’s only one choice to make: Look away or embrace the horror of everything you see.

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“Nope” Is One of the Great Movies About Moviemaking

By Richard Brody

Daniel Kaluuya as O.J. Haywood ad Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood in Jordan Peele's Nope.

The essence of the cinema is the symbol—the filming of action that stands for something else, that gets its identity from what’s offscreen. There’s plenty of action in Jordan Peele’s new film, “ Nope ,” and it’s imaginative and exciting if viewed purely as the genre mashup that it is—a science-fiction movie that’s also a modern-day Western. But even that premise bears an enormous, intrinsic symbolic power, one that was already apparent in a much slighter precursor, Jon Favreau’s 2011 film, “ Cowboys & Aliens .” Like “Nope,” Favreau’s film involves the arrival of creatures from outer space in the American West; there, it was already apparent that what the genres share is the unwelcome arrival of outsiders from afar (aliens are to Earth as white people are to this continent). Peele takes the concept many ingenious steps further.

“Nope” is a phantasmagorical story of Black people in the American West, the unwelcome among the unwelcome, and it’s set in the present-day West, namely, Hollywood and the Hollywood-proximate, the very heart of Wild West mythology. “Nope” is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders. It is an exploitation film—which is to say, a film about exploitation and the cinematic history of exploitation as the medium’s very essence.

Peele’s film is set mainly on a horse farm in California, Haywood Hollywood Horses, that provides the animals as needed for movies and TV shows and commercials. Its owner, Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David), dies mysteriously after being hit by a bullet-like piece of space debris that showers the property. The farm is taken over by his two children, Otis, Jr., called O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya), and Emerald (Keke Palmer). Neither of the heirs, though, is entirely cut out to fill Otis’s shoes. O.J., who loves the horses and works devotedly with them, is something of an introvert; he isn’t the communicator—the on-set presence—that his father was. Emerald, who is very much a communicator, is an aspiring filmmaker and actor for whom the horses are just a job, and not a very pleasant one. To address the farm’s financial troubles, they sell horses to a nearby Western theme park. But, when the source of the space debris—a monstrous U.F.O. that sucks humans and horses into its maw and eats them—makes its appearance, O.J. and Emerald are forced to fight it. They’re also inspired, for the purpose of saving the farm financially, to film it, in the hope of selling the first authentic footage of a U.F.O.

I’m being especially chary of spoilers in discussing “Nope”; I greatly enjoyed the discovery of the plot’s daring and inventive twists and turns, along with the discerning and speculative ideas that they bring to light. By remarkable design, the movie is as full of action as it is light on character psychology. There’s no special reason why O.J. is taciturn or Emerald is ebullient, or why they’re able to marshal the inner resources for mortal combat with invaders from outer space. “Nope” offers the characters little backstory—at least, not of the usual sort. Rather, Peele pushes even further with a theme that he launched in “ Get Out ” and “ Us ”: the recognition of history—especially its hidden or suppressed aspects—as backstory. With “Nope,” Peele looks specifically to the history of the cinema and its intersection with the experience of Black Americans to create a backstory that virtually imbues every frame of the movie.

For the Haywoods, the crucial backstory goes to the birth of the cinema: the real-life “moving images,” created by Eadweard Muybridge in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, that are often considered the primordial movies. Muybridge was commissioned to study the movement of a galloping horse; the name of the Black jockey he photographed riding one of those horses went unrecorded. In “Nope,” Peele creates a fictitious identity for the rider—Alistair Haywood, the family’s forebear. Emerald tells the crew on a TV commercial, who are relying on one of their horses, that, when it comes to movies, the Haywoods have “skin in the game.” Acknowledging and extending cinema’s legacy while also redressing its omissions and misrepresentations of history is the premise of “Nope”: the responsibility, the guilt, the danger, the ethical compromise of the cinematic gaze.

The film-centric symbolism of “Nope” gives rise to the film’s distinctive, surprising sense of texture. “Get Out” and “Us” are films of a thick cinematic impasto, crowded with characters and tangled with action. “Nope,” made on a much higher budget, is a sort-of blockbuster—but an inside-out blockbuster. If the first two films are oil paintings, “Nope” is a watercolor of the kind that leaves patches of the underlying paper untinted. It’s set in wide-open Western spaces, and what fills their emptiness is power: political, historical, physical, psychological.

The movie is also filled with images—imagined ones, and also real ones, a visual overlay of myth and lore that fills the Western landscape with the history of the cinema. What embodies the invisible lines of power is the gaze, of the eye and of the camera alike. Peele has been, from the start of his career, one of the great directors of point-of-view shots, of the drama and the psychology of vision, and he pursues the same idea to radical extremes in “Nope.” Point-of-view shots are at the center of the drama; again, avoiding spoilers, the spark of the drama turns out to be, in effect, eye contact—the connection of the seer and the seen (including when they’re one and the same, in reflections). Alongside the intrusive intimacy of the naked eye, Peele makes explicit the inherently predatory aspect of the photographic image—the taking of life, so to speak—and the responsibility that image-making imposes on the maker.

There’s another bit of backstory that puts the filmmaker’s responsibility front and center. The movie begins with a scene in a TV studio, where an ostensibly trained chimpanzee performing with human actors on a sitcom runs amok. (This subplot reminds me of the horrific accident on the set of “ Twilight Zone: The Movie ,” in 1982.) A survivor of the chimp’s attack, which took place in 1996, is an Asian American child actor (Jacob Kim) who now, as an adult (played by Steven Yeun), is the owner of Jupiter’s Claim, the Western theme park to which O.J. has been selling horses. The jovial owner, called Jupe, has also had some contact with the U.F.O. and is also trying to profit from it, indifferent to the risks involved. Jupe’s space-horse show (something of a mysterious, invitation-only event) makes uncannily clear the predatory connection between viewers and, um, consumers.

Peele is seriously playful with the technology of movies in ways that recall Martin Scorsese’s “ Hugo .” The action of “Nope” pivots on the power and the nature of movie technology—the contrast of digital and optical images—and the creative rediscovery of bygone methods, as reflected in its very cast of characters, which includes a young electronic-surveillance nerd and U.F.O. buff (Brandon Perea) and a grizzled cinematographer (Michael Wincott). The TV commercial for which the Haywoods rent a horse is being shot in a studio, in front of a green screen (another empty visual space shot through with power), where a melancholy horse is standing still, stripped of its majestic energy, reduced to a mere digital emblem of itself, ridden by no one but manipulated by a desk jockey with no onscreen identity at all. Peele presents the C.G.I. on which “Nope” itself depends as a dubious temptation and a form of dangerous power.

Yet the crucial bit of backstory remains unexpressed: the question of why, of all the horse farms in California, the space creatures chose to target the one that’s Black-owned. The answer to the question is one that both demands expression and faces a silencing on a daily, institutional basis. The movie opens with a Biblical quote: a scourging prophecy, from the book of Nahum. In transferring the politics of “Nope” to the intergalactic level—a sardonic vision of the universality of racism—Peele also transfers them to an overarching, spiritual, metaphysical one. He offers a scathing, exuberant vision of redemption. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Western theme park Jupiter’s Claim. It also incorrectly described the space debris that killed Otis Haywood, Sr.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Brilliantly crafted sci-fi horror tale has gore, swearing.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Showcases teamwork, inclusiveness, and problem-sol

Characters tackle a world-shattering problem with

Excellent representation on-screen and behind the

An unstable chimp covered in blood bashes a child'

Many uses of "f--k" and "s--t," plus "motherf----r

A scene takes place at Fry's Electronics, and a Fr

Main character vapes. Brief pot smoking. Brief whi

Positive Messages

Showcases teamwork, inclusiveness, and problem-solving in an attempt to defeat impossible odds. Two major themes -- which are thought-provoking, if not precisely "positive" -- involve humans' efforts to tame and control other species, coupled with our tendency to film everything.

Positive Role Models

Characters tackle a world-shattering problem with one eye on making a profit and the other on actually saving the world. Either way, they continue to fight and refuse to give up, demonstrating strong teamwork in the process.

Diverse Representations

Excellent representation on-screen and behind the scenes, including Black lead characters, a major Asian character, and a Black writer-director.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

An unstable chimp covered in blood bashes a child's face (off-screen); child's feet are seen as she lies unconscious. Kids in peril. Chimp shot with bullet from behind (blood spurt). Blood smears, spatters. Character's eye hit with projectile: blood spurts, gory wound. Lots of blood "raining" from sky above, running down windows of house. Person with mangled face. Motorcycle wreck. Scary noises. Scary stuff. Jump scares. Violent nature footage (animals killing one another) seen in film-editing bay.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Many uses of "f--k" and "s--t," plus "motherf----r," "a--hole," "bitch," "ass," "goddamn," "damn," "d--k," "pissed off," "shut up," "stupid."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A scene takes place at Fry's Electronics, and a Fry's van is used throughout. ICEE frozen treats sold at amusement park; logo seen several times. Sour Patch Kids mentioned.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Main character vapes. Brief pot smoking. Brief whiskey drinking. Characters drink from aluminum cans (possibly beer).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Nope is a sci-fi/comedy horror movie from writer-director Jordan Peele about humans and their fraught relationships with other species. It may not live up to Peele's previous films Get Out or Us in terms of cultural impact, but it's a diverse, well made, spectacularly entertaining movie that's highly recommended for mature horror fans. Be ready for some shocking violence: A blood-covered chimp goes on a rampage, pummeling a young girl off-screen and threatening a young boy. A character is killed after a projectile hits him in the eye in a pretty gory way. There's lots of blood overall: smears, spurts, and raining on a house, pouring down the windows. You can also expect disturbing noises, scary stuff, and jump scares. Language includes many uses of "f--k" and "s--t" and more. Characters vape, smoke pot, and drink. Alongside the horror elements are themes related to teamwork, inclusiveness, and problem-solving in the face of impossible odds. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (28)
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Based on 28 parent reviews

Great for teen plus

Nope ah, nope pass on this disaster of a movie. even a brilliant director can't win them all., what's the story.

In NOPE, OJ Haywood ( Daniel Kaluuya ) works with his father, Otis ( Keith David ), on a ranch, training horses for movies and TV. Otis is killed after a freak accident, and OJ finds himself struggling to run the business with his flighty younger sister, Emerald ( Keke Palmer ). A deal with former child actor Ricky Park ( Steven Yeun ), who now runs a Western-themed amusement park, helps for a bit. But when OJ sees what appears to be a UFO over their land, he and Emerald get the idea to film it -- and make a fortune. Angel (Brandon Perea), a tech-savvy Fry's Electronics employee who's also a UFO buff, helps the Haywoods set up surveillance cameras. But the next time the visitor comes back, its true nature is revealed.

Is It Any Good?

Jordan Peele 's sci-fi/comedy horror movie doesn't quite have the cultural impact of his earlier films, but it's an expertly constructed, hugely entertaining ride. Each intricate puzzle piece is perfectly fitted. Nope doesn't have as much to say about America and where we are right now as Get Out and Us did, but that's about where any complaints might stop. This film seems to be concerned with themes of humans attempting to tame and control other species, up to and including filming them for entertainment and profit. A subplot about a chimp that snapped and went on a bloody rampage on the set of a 1990s TV sitcom doesn't quite seem to belong to the overall plot about UFOs, but, upon reflection, it helps put everything in context. It connects everything.

Peele's skill as a filmmaker keeps improving. His camera placement, cutting, and shocking use of sound design and music combine to create a truly surprising experience. We're frequently kept off-balance as bits of mystery are doled out sparingly, then slyly answered, only to be replaced by new mysteries. Details that may seem insignificant can become important, or vice versa. Best of all, Peele lets his comedy side flow here. While his last two films had funny moments, the tension was too strong to really allow for laughter. Here, the balance allows for more big laughs, more often. Kaluuya and Palmer are responsible for many of these, as well as for all of the movie's heart. Kaluuya's stoic, monosyllabic character and Palmer's chatty, free-spirited one are opposites, but also part of a whole. They make us say "Yep" to Nope .

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Nope 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of scary movies ? Why do people sometimes like to be scared?

Do you consider any of the characters to be role models ? Why, or why not?

What does the subplot about the chimp's rampage have to do with the main plot about the mysterious visitor? What do you think the movie is trying to say?

How does the movie compare to Jordan Peele's films Get Out and Us ? How does Peele's body of work shine light on the ways that Black people have always been critical to cultural production in the United States in unacknowledged ways?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 22, 2022
On DVD or streaming : August 26, 2022
Cast : Daniel Kaluuya , Keke Palmer , Steven Yeun
Director : Jordan Peele
Inclusion Information : Black directors, Black actors, Female actors, Asian actors, Black writers
Studio : Universal Studios
Genre : Horror
Topics : Space and Aliens
Character Strengths : Teamwork
Run time : 135 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language throughout and some violence/bloody images.
Last updated : February 15, 2024

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Nope Movie Review: Jordan Peele’s Best Film Has All The Tricks

Nope stars daniel kaluuya and keke palmer and is directed by jordan peele.

Review: Nope is not just Jordan Peele’s best movie – it’s his most unique, using a Western backdrop to lay the groundwork for a strange Sci-Fi blockbuster. Certainly one of the best films of 2022.

Few creatives demand an audience’s attention quite like Jordan Peele does. The famed director of Get Out and Us has built himself a reputation of being one of the medium’s most astute and polished visionaries with his society-defying, brain-melting antics. He’s one of the few cultural zeitgeists to pop up in the last decade that doesn’t have significant tie-ins to a superhero property – and it’s for all these reasons that I was dying to get my hands on Nope when it came out back in July of 2022.

Combined with trailers that were essentially toying with an audience’s expectations of significant plot details, Nope was basically a meteor hurdling towards Earth in a summer that felt absent of big-budget, blockbuster hits that are essential for the film industry. He also brought back the leading man of his breakthrough hit Get Out in Daniel Kaluuya – a performer who’s garnered a reputation for being one of the industry’s most precise and charismatic actors (quite simply, he’s one of the best). Peele newcomers Keke Palmer , Steven Yeun and Brandon Perea round out a significantly accomplished cast.

So with expectations sky high, a cast of veteran actors and actresses, a nearly-blank check budget, and a crew of all-timers behind the camera ( Hoyte van Hoytema as cinematographer is truly an epic combination of wits with Peele), could the acclaimed director deliver on the potential of a new classic with all the tools at his disposal? Could he continue to usher in the new, post-pandemic era of Hollywood that Top Gun: Maverick helped set up?

Unilaterally, yes. Quite honestly, Nope is one of the best films of the decade and certainly competes with Jordan Peele ’s previous two works. As a raucous, crowd-pleasing sci-fi epic, it checks every box for a film attempting so much in its themes and grand gestures. An obvious ode to the best Steven Spielberg projects (hints of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and clearly inspired by the second half of Jaws ), Nope blows away its contemporaries in terms of scale and scope.

Every shot oozes with detail. The haunting and dreadful images send chills down your spine and the comedy sticks in almost every instance. The terrifying set pieces, from Gordie’s birthday party to the bloody storm over Haywood ranch, are some of the best this year has had to offer.

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The film does have a meticulous and slow-building set-up – one that’s been a common complaint by critics who were less favorable towards the film. But Peele has built up enough equity with his audience to strain a bit for the reveal, and Nope has quite the reveal. The grab-at-your-chest unfurling (literally) of the third act is one I’ll never forget seeing for the first time in theaters, and it sure doesn’t lose its effectiveness after multiple viewings at home.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Nope will have enough steam heading into the awards season this year, and it’s a shame. Nope is a powerful genre-defying, tense thriller with a bit of splash for everyone. This generation’s closest thing to Jaws , it’s a powerful look at our obsession with viewing – viewing the good, viewing the bad, and viewing what we shouldn’t. Curiosity rules our generation, and Peele taps into it as well as anyone. Undoubtedly, it’ll be high in my year end list. A film that I was satisfied with as I left the theater, and one that I’ve consistently thought about since its release.

Nope delivers on its promise of spectacle. Its set-up helps deliver one of the most rewarding third acts of the year, and one I’ll surely return to in years to come. Those don’t come around very often, only a handful of films lend themselves to repeat viewings, and Nope is certainly one of them. A dazzling and hypnotic viewing, and one that doesn’t leave your mind once you leave your theater. The best films make you think, and Nope gives you enough to sink your teeth into.

Genre: Horror , Sci-Fi , Thriller

Watch Nope (2022) on Peacock and VOD here

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Nope Movie Cast and Credits

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood

Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood

Brandon Perea as Angel Torres

Michael Wincott as Antlers Holst

Steven Yeun as Jupe

Director: Jordan Peele

Writer: Jordan Peele

Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema

Editor: Nicholas Monsour

Composer: Michael Abels

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Jordan Peele’s Nope, explained

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

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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.

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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Nope: how to watch, awards and everything we know about Jordan Peele’s next horror movie

Nope is the latest from the creator of Get Out and Us.

Following the massive successes of Get Out and Us , Jordan Peele is back with one of the must-see new movies of 2022 , Nope . Once again serving as writer and director, Nope is fully expected to be another wholly original idea from one of the current masters of suspense.

Peele, who before 2017 was best known for his Comedy Central sketch comedy show Key and Peele alongside Keegan-Michael Key, became a sensation with Get Out starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford. The movie would go on to earn four Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture and Peele’s directing, with a win for Peele’s original screenplay.

Us didn’t have the same awards success, but the movie starring Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke and Elisabeth Moss was similarly praised by both critics and fans.

It should be no surprise then why there’s a lot of excitement about Nope . Unsurprisingly, just like with Get Out and Us , Peele is keeping things close to the chest on his latest, but here is everything that we do know about Nope .

How to watch Nope

Nope is currently playing in movie theaters around the world, but it is also coming to digital as of August 26 (though that does not include streaming). Here's everything you need to know about how to watch Nope .

Nope reviews — what the critics are saying

The reviews for Nope have started to come in, so what are the critics saying about Jordan Peele's latest?

What to Watch's Nope review describes the movie as an ambitious sci-fi, horror mashup that may not reach the level of Peele's Get Out or Us, but is still a "cinematically rich, perfectly cast and solidly entertaining" time at the movies.

Currently, Nope has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 81%, which puts it firmly in the "Fresh" range for the site. Over on Metacritic , the movie is scoring at a 77, easily in the "good" tier.

If you want to get some quick breakdowns of what critics are saying about Nope , we've compiled some of the first reactions following the movie's Hollywood premiere on July 18.

Jordan Peele’s Nope is his most confident, unfettered, and potentially most divisive vision yet. Swapping the exclamation marks of horror for the question marks of sci-fi, this is less about scares. With hints of Close Encounters, Jaws, and more, #NopeMovie is a real puzzlebox. pic.twitter.com/Ny3EVaLTqW July 19, 2022

#NopeMovie is astounding. A trippy, terrifying sci-fi Western that also rocks a fascinating collision of big screen and real-world spectacle. Jordan Peele is just a damn master at delivering a full experience while sending you on your way with a myriad of questions to explore ... pic.twitter.com/wE4n6DxxKi July 19, 2022

The most important thing you need to know about NOPE is it’s crazy different from Get Out & Us. This is Jordan Peele spreading his wings and making big budget Spielberg/esque sci-fi, but with the subtext you’d expect. Enter with an open mind and you’ll be rewarded. #NopeMovie July 19, 2022

#NopeMovie is a resounding YES. See it on the biggest screen you can find. A thrilling and strange spectacle unlike anything else out there. I'll never look at the sky the same way again. July 19, 2022

#NopeMovie is otherworldly yet indescribable. From instances of sheer terror to heartfelt moments btwn the characters, #Nope is an experience that won't be easy to shake off as you find yourself picking your jaw up from the floor. Jordan Peele has done it again! @nopemovie pic.twitter.com/bUr1ad5TAx July 19, 2022

Nope awards and nominations

Check out the major awards and nominations that have been given to Nope :

New York Film Critics Circle

Best Supporting Actress — Keke Palmer ( winner )

Los Angeles Film Critics Association

Best Cinematography (runner up)

American Film Institute

AFI Movie of the Year

Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films

Best Science Fiction Film ( winner )
Best Actor — Daniel Kaluuya (nominee)
Best Actress — Keke Palmer (nominee)
Best Director — Jordan Peele (nominee)
Best Music (nominee)
Best Writing — Jordan Peele (nominee)
Best Editing (nominee)

People's Choice Awards

Drama Movie Star — Daniel Kaluuya (nominee)
Drama Movie Star — Keke Palmer (nominee)
Movie of 2022 (nominee)
Dram Movie of 2022 (nominee)
Female Movie Star of 2022 — Keke Palmer (nominee)

What is Nope rated?

Nope has a rating of R in the US for "language throughout and some violence/bloody images."

How long is Nope?

The runtime for Nope is two hours and 10 minutes.

This actually makes it the longest movie that Jordan Peele has made to date, as both Get Out and Us came in at under two hours.

Nope trailer

What’s a bad miracle? Jordan Peele, Nope

The first full trailer for Nope was released on Super Bowl Sunday (February 13, debuting online the morning of the big game), paired with the cryptic query "What's a bad miracle?" above. Get a sense of what that could mean with the Nope trailer below.

Universal has now unveiled what it is dubbing as the final trailer for Nope , as well as an international trailer, which goes a little more into the plot of the movie. Take a look.

You can also check out the original teaser trailer for Nope right here, which also features some footage from Get Out and Us :

Here's another teaser trailer:

Yeah, nah. No. Hell no. #NOPEMOVIE pic.twitter.com/ZBCndG64yW June 3, 2022

A feature for Nope goes behind the scenes a bit, including writer/director Jordan Peele discussing some of his inspiration behind the movie.

Nope plot

Jordan Peele has been very secretive with his movies. The plots of Get Out and Us were not shared in detail for quite some time and the writer/director is sticking to the same playbook with Nope .

There is no official plot info available on the movie's website, though we can gather from the trailers that the movie involves aliens and the brother and sister duo played by Daniel Kalyuua and Keke Palmer trying to get video evidence of a UFO that is above their ranch. However, the aliens don't seem to take to kindly to that idea.

If you've seen the movie and still have questions, here's our Nope ending explained piece.

Peele has lined up great casts to work on his previous two movies and Nope looks to be no different, especially as it will serve as a reunion between the director and his Get Out star.

Daniel Kaluuya, who played the lead role of Chris in Get Out , is set to star in Nope . In this movie, Kaluuya plays OJ Haywood, who runs the horse ranch at the center of the movie with his sister.

Keke Palmer is playing said sister, Emerald Haywood. Palmer is an actress and singer whose already having a busy year with movies like Alice and Lightyear .

Steven Yeun is also starring in Nope in the role of Ricky "Jupe" Park. Yeun is best known for his role as Glenn on The Walking Dead , but more recently he became an Oscar nominee in 2021 for his performance in Minari .

The rest of the Nope cast includes Brandon Perea ( The OA ), Michael Wincott ( Westworld season 1), Wrenn Schmidt ( For All Mankind ), Michael Busch ( Adam Ruins Everything ), Donna Mills ( General Hospital ), Barbie Ferreira ( Euphoria ), Terry Notary (a performance-caption expert who appeared in War for the Planet of the Apes and Kong: Skull Island ), Jennifer Lafleur ( Search Party), Sophia Coto ( This Is Us ) and Keith David ( The Thing ).

Get more info on the cast and their characters in our breakdown of the Nope cast .

Nope director Jordan Peele

Jordan Peele has earned a reputation as being one the present-day masters of suspense thanks to his first two movies, Get Out and Us . Nope marks Peele's third feature movie, though his career is much more active than just being behind the camera.

Many were likely first introduced to Peele as a comedic actor. He starred alongside Keegan-Michael Key in the Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele , along with other comedy titles including Rick & Morty , Keanu , Toy Story 4 and Big Mouth .

Peele is also a writer and producer. He pulled double duty on the reboot of The Twilight Zone and the 2021 movie Candyman . As a producer he has also worked on BlackKklansman , Hunters , Lovecraft Country , The Last O.G. and more.

Nope posters

Nope virtual reality experience.

Nope has its own virtual reality experience, available on Oculus devices. The experience is called " Nope World " and allows you to explore Haywood Ranch and discover hidden easter eggs from the movie. Just whatever you do, don't look up.

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Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca , Moulin Rouge! , Silence of the Lambs , Children of Men , One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars . On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd .

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More From Forbes

Henry cavill stars as james bond in viral ai-generated 007 trailer.

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Bond, AI James Bond.

Ever since Daniel Craig announced plans to retire from James Bond duties, 007 fans everywhere have imagined their favorite actors taking over as the legendary secret agent. Those who’ve dreamed of Henry Cavill in the part had reason to celebrate this week when a trailer for Bond 26 featuring the Superman actor, with Margot Robbie as his Bond girl, dropped online. Thing is, it’s fake.

“Cavill, renowned for his suave charm and undeniable charisma, steps into the role of the legendary MI6 agent with confidence and style,” reads a description of the viral video, which has gotten more than 2.5 million views since it posted to YouTube on Saturday. ”His portrayal of Bond is set to redefine the character for a new generation, blending classic sophistication with modern edge.”

In the description, creator KH Studio clearly states the footage is a concept trailer made as a creative experiment. “Its purpose is purely artistic, aiming to entertain and engage with the YouTube community,” KH Studio writes. “My goal is to showcase my creativity and storytelling skills through this trailer.”

Still, given the rushing river of online content and the speed at which it’s consumed, some viewers likely initially mistook the trailer for a real one—even though Cavill has that slightly cartoonish sheen indicative of AI-generated humans and the footage includes far less of the non-stop, high-octane action typical of Bond trailers.

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Fake or not, those who favor the idea of Cavill as 007 are pointing to the AI-generated trailer as evidence their man would be the right pick to appear in a real one.

“Henry Cavill as 007 is what we need,” one commenter wrote. Wrote another, “Wow, Cavill is a natural Bond. Get it done!”

The British actor does have links to the franchise, as he auditioned for 2006 Bond film Casino Royale , but lost out to Craig. While the Man of Steel actor had a “tremendous” audition, the movie’s director Martin Campbell revealed in an Express UK interview , at the time he looked too young to step into Bond’s tuxedo.

The next Bond actor in the blockbuster film franchise has yet to be confirmed, though the latest rumors have focused on “Kick-Ass” star Aaron Taylor Johnson , who also played Pietro Maximoff in the 2015 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Avengers: Age of Ultron .

Cavill is currently making the rounds to promote Guy Ritchie’s World War II film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, in which the actor plays Gus March-Phillipps, who founded the British Army’s No. 62 Commando. As Variety reports , the actor addressed the possibility of playing Bond during a radio interview on “The Rich Eisen Show.”

“All I have to go off of is the rumors. I have the same information you have,” Cavill answered, when asked if he’d be joining the franchise. “Maybe I’m too old now or maybe I’m not. We’ll see what the [producers’] plans are.”

KH Studio has made other fake movie trailers, including one for Back to the Future 4 starring Tom Holland and Michael J. Fox and one for a new Edward Scissorhands featuring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya .

In the description for the Bond 26 concept trailer, KH Studio says filming is set for this year at locations around the globe. It even assigns a director.

“Under the direction of visionary filmmaker Christopher Nolan, known for his masterful work on Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy,” the description reads, “audiences can expect a Bond film like no other.”

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Movie review: Jordan Peele confounds and thrills in Sci-fi horror, 'Nope'
Jordan Peele's Nope Movie Review
Nope movie review: The most creative and unique blockbuster of our time
Movie Review; Nope. : ThyBlackMan.com
Nope (2022)
Nope

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Nope Movie Review
Nope ~~Movie Review ~~ No Spoilers

COMMENTS

Nope movie review & film summary (2022)
A mixed review of Jordan Peele's "Nope", a horror film about a mysterious threat in the sky. The reviewer praises the director's style, suspense and misdirection, but criticizes the plot, the performance of Steven Yuen and the conventional ending.
Nope
Nope is a sci-fi horror film by Jordan Peele about a mysterious phenomenon in the skies. Read critic and audience reviews, watch trailers and clips, and find out where to watch Nope online.
Review: Jordan Peele's 'Nope' Gets a 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.
Nope
Read critics' and audiences' reviews of Nope, Jordan Peele's sci-fi horror film about aliens and Hollywood. See the Tomatometer score, ratings, and excerpts from various sources.
Nope review
Nope review - Jordan Peele's brilliantly horrifying ride to nowhere. The director's elliptical follow-up to Us stars Daniel Kaluuya as a California wrangler defending the family ranch from a ...
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
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 ...
Nope Review
Verdict. A hilariously bleak vision of the American dream, Jordan Peele's Nope is a farcical love letter to Hollywood filmmaking. A sci-fi-horror-comedy that builds cinematic myths before ...
Nope (2022)
Nope is a movie with an interesting name, and like most of Peele's work an interesting premise for both artistic sakes and horror sakes. He finds a way to merge the three worlds of mystery, horror, and sci-fi into this layered film, that is pretentious, but still holds entertaining elements that we like to see.
Nope
The New Yorker. Jul 26, 2022. Nope is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders.
Nope movie reviews praise Jordan Peele's new sci-fi horror blockbuster
Published on July 20, 2022. Whether Nope scratches your itch for quality cinema or simply leaves you scratching your head, critics agree on one thing: Get Out and Us helmer Jordan Peele 's ...
'Nope' Review: Jordan Peele's UFO Thriller Has More Mood Than Story
Executive producer: Robert Graf. Crew: Director, screenplay: Jordan Peele. Camera: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Editor: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels. With: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun ...
Jordan Peele's 'Nope,' reviewed : NPR
True to Peele's sensibilities, Nope seems to be borrowing from a plethora of cinematic references: Spielberg (particularly Jaws and E.T.), M. Night Shyamalan (Signs), and Alien, just to name a few ...
Nope First Reviews: Ambitious and Well Crafted, but Possibly Jordan
Nope marks the third feature from writer and director Jordan Peele, and the first reviews of the movie prove that Get Out and Us were no flukes. This time, the filmmaker is focused on a frightening science fiction story involving a horse ranch, a former child actor, and something mysterious lurking above the clouds.
Review: 'Nope' Rightly Challenges Our Love of Spectacle
In fact, it's the ultimate monster in Nope, Jordan Peele's full-throttle third feature, a sci-fi western about a mysterious UFO haunting the skies of a sleepy Southern California ranch town.
"Nope" Is One of the Great Movies About Moviemaking
Richard Brody reviews the science-fiction Western "Nope," directed by Jordan Peele and starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, and Steven Yeun.
Nope Movie Review
Nope Movie Review. 1:05 Nope Official trailer. Nope. Community Reviews. See all. Parents say (28) Kids say (50) age 14+ Based on 28 parent reviews . Nicole S. Parent. July 21, 2022 age 13+ Great for teen plus There is swearing and pot smoking. Most disturbing is a chimp that kills a girl and bites off her face.
Nope Movie Review and Rating
Nope Stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer and is Directed by Jordan Peele. Review: Nope is not just Jordan Peele's best movie - it's his most unique, using a Western backdrop to lay the groundwork for a strange Sci-Fi blockbuster. Certainly one of the best films of 2022.
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 ...
Nope: how to watch, reviews and everything we know
What to Watch's Nope review describes the movie as an ambitious sci-fi, horror mashup that may not reach the level of Peele's Get Out or Us, but is still a "cinematically rich, perfectly cast and solidly entertaining" time at the movies. Currently, Nope has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 81%, which puts it firmly in the "Fresh" range for the site.
Nope (film)
Nope (stylized in all caps) is a 2022 American neo-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 ...
Nope
Chris Stuckmann reviews Nope, starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Keith David. Directed by Jordan Peele.
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Reviewed at AMC Empire, July 19, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 135 MIN.

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