One Child Nation
Amazon Studios | Release Date: August 9, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
85
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 25 Critic Reviews
Positive:
23
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 15, 2019
In a very full and riveting 85 minutes, One Child Nation assembles a huge story together from many small, crucial pieces. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinAug 13, 2019
It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 8, 2019
Soul-baring and furious, the documentary One Child Nation takes a powerful, unflinching look at China’s present through its past. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyFeb 3, 2019
Densely informative yet always grounded in deep personal investment and clear-eyed compassion, this is a powerful indictment of a traumatic social experiment, made all the more startling by the success of the propaganda machine in making people continue to believe it was necessary. Read full review
100
Film ThreatDante JamesFeb 3, 2019
This is a documentary that is very difficult to stomach. Read full review
91
The PlaylistGary GarrisonFeb 7, 2019
Wang’s film is intimate, thought-provoking and well-crafted. It condemns the horrors of the policy without condemning those who were brainwashed into being its vessels, and it gives voice to so many families whose agency was stolen from them. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnFeb 3, 2019
Using a remarkable personal lens, the film examines the reverberations of propaganda on broken families across multiple generations. The cumulative effect creates the sense that its destructive effects continue to be felt well beyond China’s borders. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangAug 7, 2019
The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity. Read full review
90
Screen DailyJohn BerraFeb 3, 2019
One Child Nation is an utterly compelling documentary that examines the consequences of this staunchly enforced ‘social experiment’. If it stops short of making an explicit political statement, a series of powerful testimonies leaves a harrowing micro-level impression. Read full review
88
Washington PostMark JenkinsAug 14, 2019
One Child Nation covers a lot of a territory, and many of its topics need to be covered in more depth. But the directors structure the narrative effectively, and they deftly expand from the personal to the historical. This is an important film, if often a difficult one to watch. Read full review
85
Vanity FairK. Austin CollinsAug 30, 2019
One Child Nation does not flinch from critiquing mass complicity and the broader cultural logic—specifically the indoctrination into party politics—undergirding it. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattAug 7, 2019
If One Child sometimes seems to raise more questions than it can answer, and more pain than it has room to explore, the movie offers an urgent and affecting reminder of what happens when the rule of law subsumes not just free will but the very act of existing — and the humanity that still, against all odds, endures. Read full review
83
The Film StageEli FriedbergAug 5, 2019
What it lacks in formal finesse or educational scope, the film more than compensates as a taut illustration of the profound disconnect between high-level social engineering and the lived social realities that totalitarian policies entail. It’s quiet, feminist rage against Big Brother. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 26, 2019
I would have liked (in a spirit of devil’s advocacy) to hear from an economist about the measurable benefits or otherwise of this brutal approach, and perhaps to ponder the climbing global population. These reservations hardly diminish the film’s force. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearAug 9, 2019
What eventually emerges is a peerless portrait of collective trauma — a devastating look at how this law not only sociologically gutted a country but made everyone complicit in the crime. Read full review
80
The New YorkerRichard BrodyAug 8, 2019
This boldly confrontational and journalistically probing documentary, by the director Nanfu Wang, goes beyond the slogan of China’s longtime “one-child policy” to reveal the system of violence, corruption, propaganda, and silence on which it depended. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternAug 8, 2019
Shocking as it may be, One Child Nation needs to be seen. It’s a document that deepens our understanding of the totalitarian state that China was, not that long ago, of the enormity of the inhumanity that the central government visited on its most vulnerable citizens. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeMar 8, 2019
Simultaneously intimate and far-reaching, the film does far more than scratch the surface, forcing audiences to confront a policy that, amid concerns over population growth in other corners of the globe, begs to be better understood before another country seeks to repeat it. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesAug 20, 2019
It’s only in the last quarter of the film, when Wang strays from her own family’s touchstones to explore a case of separated twins, that One Child Nation loses just a touch of its urgency. Read full review
75
Boston GlobePeter KeoughAug 15, 2019
Similar to Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence” (2014) in its confrontation with those implicated in past crimes, Wang’s film differs in that many of her subjects are both victims and perpetrators. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyAug 9, 2019
Wang and Zhang's film ends with an explication of a new “two child” policy, a celebration of the one-child-policy’s overall success. The propaganda for his policy is as cheesy as that for the old one. A sense of dread as to how this policy will be enacted intermingles with a strange feeling that a true reckoning with the old way is still very far off. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubLawrence GarciaAug 6, 2019
As wide-ranging in scope as it is horrifying in its particulars, the film does the necessary work of illuminating, for a large audience, a dark chapter of Chinese history. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineChuck BowenAug 6, 2019
Rich in intimate detail, the film attains a more epic power as it burrows deeper into the effects of China’s one-child policy. Read full review
60
SlateInkoo KangAug 9, 2019
It’s not that One Child Nation needs to cater to both sides of the argument, but it would have helped contextualize how often the acts of violence the film chronicles actually happened. Read full review
60
CineVueRhys HandleyAug 8, 2019
The revelations and images contained within are individually resonant and telling of a wider picture, but there’s a sense that Wang, or perhaps her financiers, are cautious of pushing too far. Unfortunately, this winds up leaving One Child Nation a muddle of confused half-messages which reach for and fall slightly short of an admirable goal. Read full review
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