If your holiday season went by with a blur (or you are skipping outings thanks to the Omicron Variant, which is not a Transformer but a spinoff of Coronavirus) then you might have missed these two movies released between Thanksgiving and Christmas that both feature Bradley Cooper.

Nightmare Alley, directed by Guillermo del Toro, is the second film adaptation of the book of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham. The story, which takes place in the Depression-era Midwest, is about Stan Carlisle (Cooper), a down-on-his-luck drifter fleeing his past who ends up working in a traveling carnival owned by Clem (Willem Dafoe.) Though Stan starts off doing odd jobs, he gets close with the mentalist Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) and her partner, her alcoholic husband Pete (David Strathairn), who has honed his craft of carefully coded messages that allow Zeena to fool the gullible audience into believing she has psychic powers.

Stan gets Pete to teach him his secrets, while courting one of the other sideshow geeks, Molly (Rooney Mara), who plays an electrified girl. After tragedy strikes Zeena and Pete, Stan decides to run off with Molly and strike out on his own, doing mentalist tricks for a more upscale audience.

Stan and Molly get a job in a club that caters to the upper crust, and Stan’s act is good enough that he catches the eye of several of the town’s important people. During one performance, their act is interrupted by psychologist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett,) who attempts to reveal their tricks. Stan gets the better of Ritter, publicly humiliating her. He is later approached by Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), wealthy and ruthless businessman who is convinced of Stan’s abilities and offers to pay him handsomely to allow him to assuage his guilt over his dead son. With Lilith’s help (she feeds Stan inside info about her patient) and despite Molly’s objections to the “spook show,” (the trick is supposed to be clearly labeled as a trick, and not an attempt to convince bereft loved ones that their lost family members are speaking to them) Stan agrees.

From there, everything goes sideways, with predictable betrayals and an outcome you will probably guess well before it plays out on screen. Despite being a Del Toro movie, this bears a greater resemblance to Tod Browning’s Freaks than to Pan’s Labyrinth – the only monsters in this movie are human beings. Despite these flaws, and despite its lackluster box office performance, this is a movie worth seeing, even if you do wait to stream it.

Licorice Pizza couldn’t be more different than Nightmare Alley; it’s a slice-of-1970s-life movie from Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Magnolia) and while Cooper shows up in a scene-stealing role, the film really belongs to Alana Haim (part of the band Haim) and Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of Anderson’s go-to actors for his movies.)

Cooper plays Gary Valentine, a 15-year-old child actor starting to age out of the business. He meets Alana, who works for the company taking the school photographs. Alana says she’s 25, but gives the audience reason to believe she’s inflating her age a bit, which is a good thing, as Gary starts to pursue Alana romantically, though not in an aggressive or crude way.

Gary gamely tries to keep his face on screen, but he knows that he needs more than that to help his family, including his manager mom, (Mari Elizabeth Ellis.) He operates a number of side hustles throughout the movie, including selling waterbeds to the stars and opening a pinball palace after finding out that the law banning them is about to expire.

Alana is trying to make something of herself too, first helping Gary with his schemes and then volunteering to help the political career of a local councilman who is hiding a secret from his constituents.

While the movie doesn’t have much of a plot to speak of, a lot happens as the two main characters work their way through their lives and towards each other. (For anyone squeamish of they age difference between the two, nothing really physical happens between the two.) The movie features actors like Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harriet Sansom Harris, Christine Ebersole, John Michael Higgins, and Maya Rudolph playing characters loosely based on real actors like Lucille Ball and William Holden. Haim’s real-life family, including her singing group sisters Danielle and Este, play her family in the movie, and director Anderson’s own kids also play parts.

Bradley Cooper plays Jon Peters, the skirt-chasing hairdresser who was Barbra Streisand’s lover for a while, and his performance, though brief, is an absolute scream. Leonardo DiCaprio’s father George appears in the movie; incidentally Cooper got his roles in both of this movie and Nightmare Alley after Leo backed out of both films.

The movie plays like a love letter to both the movie business and the more carefree era of 1970s Los Angeles – Encino, to be exact – though it does address some social and political issues like the gas crisis of the early 70s, which provides a lot more character motivation in a movie like this one than you would expect.

Haim and Hoffman are both exceptionally charming in their roles, and the rest of the cast, even the numerous child actors, have a natural and unforced realness about them. Though their love story really doesn’t need to happen, it doesn’t feel as wrong as it might be in another movie. There are a couple uncomfortably racist jokes, but the purpose of the jokes seems to point out that the person making them is a complete ass.

The soundtrack to the movie is killer, with songs by Nina Simone, David Bowie, Sonny and Cher, Gordon Lightfoot, Jonny Greenwood, Blood Sweat and Tears and so many more making the movie a toe-tapping delight. Licorice Pizza may not really go anywhere as a movie, but it’s a joyful ride.