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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
102
Mixed:
60
Negative:
10
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Critic Reviews
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 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 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 15, 2016
Season 6 Review:
The whole thing is staged in a strange and somewhat discombobulating manner--with act breaks that carry a logo and the name “My Roanoake Nightmare,” the season feels like a reality show. ... This one, on the other hand, has the potential to excel as something American Horror Story has never been: a simple scary story, an old campfire tale delivered in a modern manner but still loyal to the more clear-eyed, heart-in-mouth horror of the unknown.
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Oct 7, 2015
Season 5 Review:
It’s both aware of its chaos and totally unconcerned with taming it--and whether or not you have an appetite for whatever fresh hell Murphy and Falchuk have cooked up this season will largely depend on your ability to just sit down and enjoy what American Horror Story has already become: a threadbare yarn, extravagantly told.
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Oct 6, 2015
Season 5 Review:
That set is easily the most interesting thing about the show so far.... In Ms. Lange’s absence, the role of malevolent den mother appears to have gone to Lady Gaga, and that’s a pretty steep drop-off. Other members of the Horror Story repertory company return and continue to do amusing work, however. The story they inhabit this time around barely comes into focus in the first episode, which plays like a series of vignettes with only the loosest of connections.
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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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Oct 7, 2014
Season 4 Review:
It still has plenty of clever touches in word and picture.... But it’s not particularly scary, and doesn’t even feel that creepy or freakish, despite the sideshow setting and the obvious attempt to emulate one of the eeriest of American movies, Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” from 1932.
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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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Uncle BarkyAug 31, 2017
Season 7 Review:
Through it all, Peters again excels--performance-wise, at least--as a Trump acolyte whose fires burn white hot from election night on. His full investments in deranged characters remain a wonder to behold. But as Kai’s manipulations thicken, so do AHS: Cult’s overall misfires and excesses.
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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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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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The Daily BeastOct 26, 2023
Season 12 Review:
It’s Kim Kardashian who makes this season truly worth watching. Her affected line readings and familiar face might make it hard to take the show completely seriously, but that’s exactly what AHS needs: a season that has given up on trying to be anything more than good, campy fun.
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Sep 21, 2023Sep 13, 2018
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 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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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 6, 2014
Oct 5, 2011
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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Oct 4, 2011
Season 1 Review:
American Horror Story has the potential to be a lot of fun, if that style and cleverness can be eventually coupled with characters we care about and a narrative that feels less like a haunted house sampler, stitched with threads of Stephen King, Hammer Films and Lars von Trier's TV series "The Kingdom."
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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 7, 2013
Season 3 Review:
As with all three incarnations of AHS, there are some beautiful images (courtesy of director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and cinematographer Michael Goi), and Murphy and Falchuk’s script exhibits a knowing familiarity with the genre. Still, there’s always something unsavory about using the supernatural as a shield to indulge in sex-laced sadism, which has become a common and frankly rather tired aspect of the whole latex-clad-gimp streak running through the series.
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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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