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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
14
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
IndieWireJan 25, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Wang makes it easy to see how individuals connect to a family, how families connect to a community, and how communities connect to society at large. Sometimes, it can be difficult to recognize how our personal motivations affect other people, especially when catastrophes feel big enough to overwhelm everything else, but “Expats” expertly breaks life down into parts, before bringing it all together again in a moving, unshakable portrait.
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Jan 23, 2024
Season 1 Review:
At its core, though, Expats is a meditation on womanhood and the ancillary pressures placed on them by society, parents, children, partners, and even themselves. a deeply heart-wrenching drama, Expats is not always an easy watch. But Wang has gifted us with a truly formidable show, the kind that sticks with you long after the credits roll.
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Jan 25, 2024
Season 1 Review:
What elevates the series beyond a potentially maudlin plot is the nuanced sense of connectedness Wang conjures, not just among central characters plucked from their home countries, but also between the expats and the diverse, teeming, politically precarious urban island they’ve chosen to inhabit.
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EmpireJan 26, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Wang’s storytelling abilities and talent for showing the nuances of everyday life ground this tale of wealth and trauma while taking it in a fresh direction. A bold new step for a consistently exciting director.
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iJan 26, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Expats is an unusual beast. Its deliberately piecemeal approach makes it seems unlikely that Wang will offer us a neat and tidy ending, preferring instead to present a tale that is frequently hard to pin down. Which, for a story about people far from home, might be precisely the point.
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Jan 25, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Expats is patient in its storytelling, which is not to suggest it’s boring — rather, it trusts in the compassion of its writing and the rawness of its performances to hold our attention as its three leads circle around their unwieldy feelings or flail in their ugly fallout.
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The TelegraphJan 23, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The series, adapted and directed by Lulu Wang, plays out like the novel on which it is based: there are no neat conclusions, just overlapping stories and messy relationships, and a sense of melancholy. At its heart is Hong Kong itself, captured by cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano.
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Jan 25, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The middle hours of Expats hit the most roadblocks—after a flashback second episode neatly and carefully laying down all the tension bubbling up in the first, the show spins wheels in too obvious ways, the lowest point being a fourth episode where all our characters are trapped in single locations and are forced to directly and ineffectively voice their trauma. It’s imperfections like these that chip away at Expats’ merits, giving us a worthy but imperfect next step in Wang’s career.
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Jan 16, 2024
Jan 23, 2024
Jan 25, 2024
Season 1 Review:
If anything, the fifth episode feels like Expats apologizing for being another series about the inner lives of the wealthy. It touches on the political backdrop of Hong Kong, but does so in the vaguest of ways, with none of the assured over-emphasis visited upon its other themes. Despite having entirely too much time on its hands, Expats only tentatively steps outside of its bubble.
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Jan 24, 2024
Season 1 Review:
A viewer may be inclined to blame the relentless tone of misery on the script, and there's plenty in it to earn blame. But the actors are an unpleasant group to hang out with, having apparently been directed by Ms. Wang to give everything from a Chinese crackdown to a crack in a ceiling (a metaphor for Hong Kong's collapsing independence, one presumes) the same emotional weight. When everything is treated as a tragedy, everything becomes trivial, which is not a bad description of "Expats."
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