- Network: Apple TV+
- Series Premiere Date: Oct 11, 2024
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
In the series’s straight-ahead thriller sections, he [Cuarón] excels at building tension and staging horror. .... Still, “Disclaimer” is easier to admire than to enjoy. It grows increasingly and unproductively grim as it builds toward its well-telegraphed moral. It is the kind of accomplishment that you remember not emotionally but mechanically; you want to spread the parts out on a workbench and examine how they fit together.
-
Works when it embraces its pulpier instincts but unwisely opts, during its table-turning finale, to wag its finger at anyone who might have enjoyed its more thriller-ish aspects.
-
For a filmmaker, twist-heavy plots pose two obvious challenges: clarity and plausibility. Cuarón handles the first pretty well, the second not so much. .... The problem is that the dislikable things are done by or done to such consistently dislikable people. Caring about what happens next and why is puzzle-solving. Caring about the people involved is something more. “Disclaimer,” alas, is something less.
-
The final episodes put the pieces together but repeat too much previous information and force the brilliant Kline into too many iterations of dastardly yet likable. By episode six, you wonder if this material is better suited to a movie.
-
Slow, turgid, self-important but beautifully shot episodes are interspersed with the occasional scene – usually courtesy of an astonishing Manville – that pops up amid the stilted, mannered rubbish on screen and suddenly bursts your heart with grief, then puts it in a blender and purees it.
-
Disclaimer is too much time to spend with characters that the filmmaker regards with indifference at best and ignorance at worst. Cuarón renders this tale of rage, regret, and retribution in broad strokes. He loses the thread on their interiority, outsourcing the conveyance of their feelings to long-winded internal monologues.
-
The infuriating voice-over is, unfortunately, all of a piece with a thriller that is at least thrilling – two stars for that – but is otherwise overwrought. The dialogue is hackneyed and the very, very long sex scenes smack of desperation.
Awards & Rankings
There are no user reviews yet.