This adaptation of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is equal parts unwieldy and ambitious.
After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.
Renée Zellweger can reach all the notes and hit all the marks, but Garland’s intense emoting eludes her.
Joe Talbot’s film is a melancholic reflection on gentrification and urban black experience.
If Beale Street Could Talk is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.
As in Gillian Robespierre’s prior collaboration with Jenny Slate, the film’s studied amiability becomes obnoxious.
The film’s fourth-wall-breaking wags a finger at the perceived facile nature of celebrity-driven mass culture even as it ultimately condescends to audiences.
All of the film’s nuances are ultimately negated by the its relentless canonization of its subject.
The episode ends American Horror Story: Freak Show on an unsurprisingly dour and haphazard note.
Freak Show helps to confirm an unofficial rule about the series at large: The more a season actively utilizes its chosen setting, the better it is.
“Magical Thinking” finds the series resorting to its usual bag of boring, hyperbolically over-plotted tricks.
The film’s chief misstep is taking its title too literally, and ultimately depicting Louie as an indestructible, and thus largely inhuman, superhero.
You may be inclined to wonder throughout the typically atypical murder sequences and arbitrary character epiphanies how this series is written.
“Blood Bath” is another of American Horror Story: Freak Show’s housecleaning episodes.
The episode is intended to remind audiences who Freak Show’s denizens precisely are before a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Bullseye” sports a tempo that’s decidedly slow, obsessive, and damn near ponderous for Freak Show.
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.