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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
37
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianNov 20, 2024
Sep 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The final run of the series is both sensitive and devastating, moving without being sentimentalized. People often summarize stories about women with the catchall label, “It’s about female friendship.” But what these two have is something more complex and elusive — it is also a competition, a dependency, a fascination, a symbiosis. This is, simply put, one of the most incisive portraits of a lifelong relationship ever made for TV.
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IndieWireFeb 28, 2022
Season 3 Review:
Engrossing. ... The series, like Ferrante’s book, offers a vivid, close treatment of female friendship. The relationship between Lenù and Lila remains constant in its inconstancy, sustained by jealous curiosity alongside affection. This season, it’s the interactions between Lenù and her mother Immacolata (Annarita Vitolo) that struck me as new and edifying.
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Mar 19, 2020
Season 2 Review:
"My Brilliant Friend" has returned for a second season more affecting, in an alarming way, than the first, though in every way just as impressive in its penetrating portraiture of Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace), the friends at the center of this tale set in 1950s Naples, based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.
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Nov 18, 2018
Season 1 Review:
HBO has enjoyed a good deal of success with its limited series, many of them driven by high-profile stars, a la "Big Little Lies." Here, the book is the centerpiece, and the setting and performances make it possible to escape almost entirely into the sometimes aching, sometimes stirring, almost invariably beautiful world of My Brilliant Friend.
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Nov 16, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The casting is exceptional. Every face and body is credible as one that might actually have lived in that period. The performances are alert and sensitive without seeming studied. ... This is a late-breaking candidate for show of the year, a drama about the place where aspiration and reality intersect.
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Nov 15, 2018
Sep 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
My Brilliant Friend: Season 4 kicks off with a compelling and dramatic premiere that will immediately have viewers hooked and hungry for more. From the incredible acting to the impactful writing, this Italian series continues to expertly depict the complexity of human relationships over time and seems poised to end on a high with this fourth and final season.
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Mar 16, 2020
Season 2 Review:
[My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name] still expertly portrays the bewilderingly contradictory dynamics of female friendships. But it also offers savagely dramatic, heartstrings-pulling, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cliffhangers. ... Season two reconciles that heaviness [of season one] with a pleasurable mix of plot, visual oompf and pacing: It is shot after shot of arrestingly pure swoon, even when it’s damply dreary. What’s more, it moves, giving viewers more twists and turns, more suspense, and more emotionally resonant brushstrokes that bring the largely emotional experience of reading Ferrante’s books into vivid Technicolor.
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TV Guide MagazineNov 26, 2018
Season 1 Review:
With a sensationally authentic cast--this unsentimental story movingly depicts emotional resilience in changing times. [26 Nov - 9 Dec 2018, p.9]
Nov 16, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Book fans may be at a slight advantage, since if you’ve forgotten who someone is in a book, you can always go back a few pages. That is a minor complaint in the face of a series that gripped me from frame one, despite telling a very small, intimate story that occasionally amounts to two girls learning lessons about how the world works and little else.
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Nov 16, 2018
Season 1 Review:
My Brilliant Friend, whose first installment airs on HBO on Sunday, presents the story of Lenù and Lila’s girlhood with all the unsparingness of Ferrante’s writing. ... Against this somber backdrop, the young actors sparkle. Del Genio gives off a placid but stubborn energy as Lenù, contrasting with Nasti’s ferocious intensity as Lila. When the two are replaced by older actresses who play the characters as teenagers, they almost uncannily match their younger counterparts.
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Nov 14, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The limited series, about the long, complex friendship between Elena and Lila, breathtakingly renders Ferrante’s world on the poor outskirts of Naples in all its simple beauty and cruelty. But its first two episodes, set in the 1950s, are elevated most by Elisa Del Genio and Ludovica Nasti, who play the preteen Elena and Lila, respectively. ... Insightful and clear-eyed, My Brilliant Friend takes you there.
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Nov 14, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Throughout, we see the world the way the girls see it, knowing what they know. The world seems bigger to them, and thus their emotions always feel bigger, in ways that can make My Brilliant Friend acutely thrilling or devastating. ... This is a great show with a huge heart. Just be prepared for it to break yours every now and then.
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The TimesMar 10, 2022
Sep 4, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Young Elena and Lila dominate the series' first two hours so completely that none of the other characters in their orbit really stand out, which also means none of them stand out as fake or distracting. ... The series' first two hours mark an extraordinarily promising beginning.
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