Is director Jordan worth all the hype? It’s a Nope from me

Despite all the hype, slick marketing and, indeed, an Oscar, I’ve never been quite convinced of the talents of actorturned-director Jordan Peele. I liked his first film, Get Out… until the point came when I didn’t. And his second, Us, released two years later in 2019, left me wondering whether he really was reinventing the horror-flick wheel quite as radically as his growing army of admirers would have us believe.

Now he’s back with his third picture in five years, Nope, and sadly my scepticism has only grown. This is the least effective of the trio: painfully slow, overburdened with plot and not exactly awash with the sort of performances to make you pleased you bought a ticket.

Clearly deliberately, it has the most unsettling of openings, but it’s indicative of what’s to come that it confuses far more than it intrigues.

In one strand, a bloody flashback takes us to the studio set of an American sitcom, where a chimpanzee has run

Nope

Cert: 15, 2hrs 10mins

Eiffel

Cert: 15, 1hr 48mins

Where Is Anne Frank

Cert: PG, 1hr 39mins amok, brutally attacking his human co-stars.

Back in the present day, on a parched Californian horse ranch, O.J. (British Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya) watches incredulously as his horse-wrangling father is suddenly killed by a small object dropping from the sky. Did it fall from a plane? Or from something more sinister, hiding up there in the clouds? Come on, this is a Peele movie – which do you think?

But goodness, it takes a long time