presented as Del Toro's "The Prestige", it has little or nothing of Nolan's work, while it has everything of the Mexican filmmaker's art. The colors (turned to green in the interiors just like in "The Shape of Water"), the historical period, the monsters/freaks, the attention to the framing, the interior architecture, well this Fair is Del's Expo Bull. A film that, visually, is a constant pleasure and even the crudest sequences or the most disturbing images are always carefully crafted and refined. The female cast (Colette, Mara, Blanchett) always enchanted by the handsome Cooper adds refinement to a setting that has nothing welcoming about it, while the protagonist deceives everyone with charisma and "mentalistic" games that seem to come out of the screen and influence us spectators too . A Noir from other times, lost in the obsessive smoke, in the always rainy or snowy climate, with evocative flashbacks (which betrayed me a little, taking me to evolutions that didn't exist) and... well-recognizable characterizations of the characters. At the end of the viewing I have the feeling that something was missing, but on balance it's more my fault for a plot that I expected and never got where I thought it would. I imagine several nominations for the next Oscars.

EDIT: I didn't know the original and I was missing some references. As it happens, that sense of "absence" that I perceived and couldn't explain was precisely in the director's choice not to tell the protagonist's past, except through evocative images often taken in flashbacks. There was also a bit more sexuality missing, too glossy here, never murky, never vulgar (in fact I defined it refined above).