“Blood Bath” is another of American Horror Story: Freak Show’s housecleaning episodes.
Paul Schrader’s personality reveals itself in the film’s joylessness, which is meaningless without his occasionally poignant existentialism.
Benicio del Toro’s performance is showy, a great actor’s parade of indulgences that occasionally sets a deranged camp tone.
The episode is intended to remind audiences who Freak Show’s denizens precisely are before a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.
They’re great films, period, and Criterion appropriately honors their elusive, pared, and despairingly and misleadingly plain-spoken brilliance.
A sturdy, few-frills transfer of a film that’s only for Robert Altman’s most devoted admirers.
The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.
“Bullseye” sports a tempo that’s decidedly slow, obsessive, and damn near ponderous for Freak Show.
It’s a miracle that this underappreciated horror fantasy has received any attention at all. Horror fans should be appropriately grateful.
Some extras would be nice, particularly considering the legends who had their hands in this vibrantly cynical rock horror film.
A confident work that smashingly updates the Southern gothic for contemporary generations.
Bad Turn Worse is a reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable.
The film is less concerned with portraiture than with getting all of its expository ducks in a row.
With the series belaboring the freaks’ theoretically unexpected likability at every possible turn, it’s the villains who stand to walk away with Freak Show.
The pleasure of writing, of pairing words with another to create a distinct or lingeringly atmospheric or poetic effect, seems beyond King’s concern these days.
Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo’s most promising windows.
This fascinating, ironic, dry telling of the legendary Burke and Hare story receives one of Shout! Factory’s very best transfers.
Creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk seem to forget that if everything is “shocking” and “subversive,” then nothing is.
An honest tearjerker that treats its characters with respect, according them a great sense of wounded, tattered dignity.
The film remains one of cinema’s great, persuasive testaments to the flimsiness of the precarious tightrope walk that is our lives.