Shout! Factory’s release is stacked with enough goodies to satisfy a king-sized appetite for all things Kong.
The series nearly approaches farce as its shocking developments pile up, defying reality and credulity.
Feud: Bette and Joan is at its canniest when contrasting Bette and Joan’s respective vanities.
This production is shadelessly lit for much of its runtime, evoking the drama’s openness, or at least its frankness.
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.
It serves as one of the definitive American explorations of the weird and precarious relationship that exists between actor and director.
A shrug-worthy stab at picturing the contemporary black market, delving into a fantasyland of luxe coastal casinos and neon-lit bathhouses.
“Orphans” finds Freak Show taking a surprisingly earnest detour from its usual preachy, ultra-violently “relevant” shenanigans.
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.
Creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk seem to forget that if everything is “shocking” and “subversive,” then nothing is.
With “Edward Mordrake (Part 1),” Freak Show plays to its strengths, sounding its themes through action rather than talk.
It allows us to leisurely soak in the considerable atmospherics of Elsa’s financially imperiled Cabinet of Curiosities.
It’s clear that creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have returned ready to play.
Criterion legitimizes this brilliant musical X-ray with a transfer that admirably refuses to moot its seamy, gritty, furious poetry.