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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
102
Mixed:
60
Negative:
10
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Critic Reviews
Oct 7, 2015
Season 5 Review:
As an actress, Lady Gaga wears clothes very well. That’s not the dis it seems. The extended 90-minute premiere doesn’t give her much chance to act, or speak, for that matter.... As Dr. Alex Lowe, John’s estranged wife, returning player Chloe Sevigny provides a welcome balance to the over-the-top bloodletting, but as good as she is, the bad soap opera dialogue just proves Murphy and Falchuk have no interest in writing “normal,” whatever that is. They’re here to deliver spectacle.
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Sep 21, 2023
Season 12 Review:
Frankly, keeping track of the various incarnations of this series has at times felt like its own kind of ordeal, requiring attention (from critics, anyway) because of its inexplicable popularity despite being as subtle as a blow to the head with a bag of hammers. “Delicate” might not fully alter that dynamic, but the eerie qualities of the premiere at least establish it as the kind of introduction that spurs curiosity, as Cohen might put it, to watch what happens next.
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Sep 5, 2017
Season 7 Review:
American Horror Story: Cult clearly intends to be provocative, using the toxic partisan political divide -- beginning with the 2016 presidential election -- as its jumping-off point. But producer Ryan Murphy's anthology series is too blunt an instrument to effectively probe that terrain, using the equivalent of an axe where a scalpel is required.
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ColliderSep 5, 2017
Season 7 Review:
The metaphors may be a problematic mess (I’ll wait to see the whole series before making any judgment), but there’s a crackling energy to Cult as it explores the consequences of a society desperate to assign blame for consequences we don’t even fully understand yet. Cult mines satire out of a real-life farce, and finds terror there too.
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Sep 21, 2023
Season 12 Review:
AHS: Delicate has the potential to be a good installment of American Horror Story, because of good performances from Roberts and Kim K. But there are also a lot of red flags that indicate that the season may get too weighed down in the pop culture aspect of Roberts’ character at the sacrifice of actual blood and horror.
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Sep 5, 2017
Season 7 Review:
Paulson and Peters are electric the few times they’re onscreen together, two political-extremist poles that magnetically attract. I suspect these first three episodes might constitute an extended prologue, frustratingly similar to how the first half of Roanoke was an overextended set-up for the perspective-shifting madness of the final episodes.
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HollywoodChicago.comOct 9, 2013
Season 3 Review:
There are a LOT of characters and one hopes that Murphy & Falchuk don’t allow the program to get weighed down in subplots. Even if the show does get scattered, great performances by Lange, Bates, Bassett, Roberts, and Farmiga should keep viewers from wanting to leave this Coven.
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IndieWireAug 31, 2017
Season 7 Review:
Even if you buy into Ally as an ignorant figure from 2016, “AHS” feels dated, and it surely doesn’t make for compelling TV. For horror fans uncaring of political relevance or accurate representation, it should be noted that American Horror Story: Cult is also quite boring. ... The politics of fear may work, but the twisted logic in this futile exercise falls apart quickly.
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IndieWireSep 15, 2016
Season 6 Review:
Murphy and Falchuk didn’t exactly sell a whole new “Horror Story” in the first hour, but what’s here marks an effort to try something new in a franchise that both reinvents itself every season and remains frustratingly similar. ... "My Roanoke Nightmare” is a promising start with a central mystery as tantalizing as the ads teasing it.
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IndieWireOct 7, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Aside from the always sterling production design--there is one audacious sign of hope in this otherwise trite Hotel.... I wouldn't go so far as to say Gaga's talent adds much to the proceedings, but her presence--and the manner in which its captured — certainly does.
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Oct 9, 2013
Season 3 Review:
There's still blood and gore all over the floor, mind you. Not to mention rape, gruesome torture and evil run riot, and that's just the first episode. But there's also a lightness of touch and tone, a backlight of sly humor and, more important, a clearly delineated narrative.
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Sep 1, 2017
Season 7 Review:
This show is trying to do a lot. Some may find that approach excessive and the idea of Grand-Guignol–ing what’s happening in our country a little crass, especially since the show takes some pretty pointed jabs at progressives. Others, especially those well-versed in the series’ over-the-top sensibility and drily snarky humor, will dig into it all with complete relish ... The whole cast is terrific, but the series is (no surprise) a real showcase for Paulson, who’s a bundle of jangled nerves and teary-eyed fear.
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Sep 15, 2016
Season 6 Review:
All of that is clever, but after watching last night’s episode, I’m still not sure whether this season can accomplish what earlier seasons of American Horror Story and this summer’s Stranger Things did: spin all those embedded references into something engrossingly new. One of the problems of the documentary-style approach is that it automatically sucks some of the tension out of what we’re watching.
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Oct 7, 2015
Season 5 Review:
I found the first episode (the only one sent out to critics; gosh, I wonder why) confusing, tedious, annoyingly precious, and often ostentatiously brutal, with even clunkier-than-usual dialogue (more so than previous seasons; consider yourself warned), but also darkly beautiful, deeply weird, and (sometimes) exhilarating.
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Oct 5, 2011
Oct 6, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Like the previous four "AHS" editions, the fifth is a visual feast (which is probably the wrong word here, but you get the idea). Everything--everyone, and not just Gaga--is eroticized, too. Even the shadows are seductive. A shame that it all feels so grim and joyless.
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Sep 22, 2023
Season 12 Review:
It’s a rather tedious affair, but somehow Kardashian’s performance proves there’s room for something bolder, battier, and bloodier lurking within the body of this season. Perhaps the best way for Delicate to solve its nuance problem is to double down and do away with it altogether.
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Oct 24, 2013
Season 3 Review:
Despite its cheap shock effects, the show is indulgently ridiculous. [[28 Oct 2013, p.41]
Oct 25, 2012
Season 2 Review:
It's dark, big-top sadism, and we wait for a story to emerge. [5 Nov 2012, p.41]
Sep 30, 2011
Season 1 Review:
It's funny and moves blindingly fast, barely giving you time to blink or gulp--Dark Shadows for the PlayStation age. [10 Oct 2011, p.39]
Oct 17, 2012
Season 2 Review:
Not everyone's going to like this or other aspects of Sister Jude's story, which essentially does for nuns what the first season did for real estate agents. But it's the kind of cliché meant to appeal to parochial-school survivors of a certain age of which, yes, I'm one. And Murphy another.
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Oct 4, 2011
Oct 7, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Unlike some seasons of “AHS,” Hotel lacks dark humor, at least in tonight’s initial outing.... Visually, the premiere episode is a stunner, from the hotel set to the use of a fish-eye lens on the camera that squeezes so much into the frame.... Heavy on atmosphere in its early going and light on plot, a storyline starts to kick in around the premiere’s halfway point.
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RogerEbert.comSep 5, 2017
Season 7 Review:
It’s about the instability that has unearthed itself from the ground since Donald J. Trump was elected, one that feeds our greatest fears, from either side of the aisle, and, while it sometimes displays Murphy's go-for-broke inconsistency of character and style, it also makes for very fascinating television.
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RogerEbert.comOct 6, 2015
Season 5 Review:
American Horror Story: Hotel is cluttered, unfocused, ridiculous, and silly, but it is very self-aware and stunningly confident at the same time. Murphy and Falchuk almost dare you not to join in the chaos, and it certainly feels more assured than the inconsistent “Freak Show.”
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RogerEbert.comOct 8, 2014
Season 4 Review:
The overall narrative is a bit lacking, just as you don’t go to a circus show in the hope of seeing all the various acts tied together through storytelling. Yes, there’s a murder to hide, a few secrets for each of the major characters, and Murphy’s overall arc of the outcast who holds more humanity than the “normal people,” but I hope the actual storytelling of American Horror Story: Freak Show improves in subsequent episodes.
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Sep 5, 2017
Season 7 Review:
The fears fueling Cult are internal and externalized in an intensely gruesome fashion. It feels like just the ticket at some points, and at many others, seems too unsustainable to bear for an entire season. Its relative appeal, then, feels like a moment-to-moment determination.
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Oct 6, 2014
Oct 8, 2015
Season 5 Review:
Although the first episode runs for a bloated 90 minutes, it provides only scant hints of a main plot thread.... So once again, I'm confronted with an AHS season that appears to be more gross than engrossing. Alas, I may not be able to check out of the Hotel Cortez, but at least I can change the channel.
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Oct 6, 2015
Season 5 Review:
[Lady Gaga] purrs like no other American Horror Story cast member has, turning the arch dialogue into something spellbinding, maybe even sexy.... More interesting than its tepid attempts at horror, and its even lousier ones at humor, is that American Horror Story is examining history through subjective perspective, art, architecture, and so on.
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Oct 16, 2012
Sep 6, 2017
Season 7 Review:
Unsurprisingly, though, it is not Cult’s take on Trump voters that has any real frisson. Murphy doesn’t respect that point of view enough to make it sound like anything other than raving semi-philosophy. But the show is more scathing about liberals and Ally in particular.
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Oct 7, 2015
Season 5 Review:
AHS: Hotel more obviously resembles the first two, better seasons of American Horror Story than it does the latter, lesser two.... John provides the note of contrast and relief so delicious in the early goings of a scary story: the skeptical person who does not yet know fear, and who, for just a little while, is safe to hang around with.
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Oct 7, 2015
Season 5 Review:
[Creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk] want to horrify and disgust their audience, pushing well into the realm of slasher porn as perversions, sexual and otherwise, bleed into pleasure killings. Disturbing us is the point, of course, but good horror stories go beyond grotesqueries and gore. American Horror Story: Hotel may do that.
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Oct 8, 2014
Season 4 Review:
Based solely on the premiere, American Horror Story: Freak Show might rate a rave, or at least a "great if you like this sort of thing." But since the first season, I've learned that Murphy and Falchuk don't reliably follow the path they start down, often seeming to prefer to gross viewers out than tell a coherent story.
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