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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
12
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jun 3, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Ren Faire, HBO’s perceptive and surprisingly thrilling three-part portrait of the Texas Renaissance Festival as it approaches its 50th anniversary, is not that kind of story [offbeat, warmhearted nonfiction films about nerdy subcultures]. It’s Succession, but with corsets and chainmail.
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The Mercury NewsJun 5, 2024
Season 1 Review:
If Netflix’s “Tiger King” made your jaw drop, get ready for it to fall to the ground while watching Lance Oppenheim’s wild three-part HBO series. It addictively covers the house-of-cards succession plans being hashed out for the Texas Renaissance Festival. Oppenheim melds documentary vérité for a fascinating depiction of 86-year-old King George’s (George Coulam) pursuit to pick a “suitable” successor.
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Jun 17, 2024
Season 1 Review:
With characters as richly entertaining as King George and his minions, Oppenheim needed to do little to make “Ren Faire” compelling. But, even as a young filmmaker, Oppenheim already has a strong set of visual and narrative signatures which he deploys to amplify his subject matter, rendering his stories much more like dramatic films than conventional documentaries.
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Jun 3, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“Ren Faire” does a lose a little steam in its final third, as the characters — now including a third contender, Darla Smith, appointed co-manager with Jeff — continue to go ‘round in circles. You may share their frustration. But as time spent in a different sort of place — different even from the one the characters imagine inhabiting — it’s a quite rewarding, even refreshing, not-overlong watch. And the ending is, in its way, happy.
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May 31, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It’s a study in excess that I don’t necessarily recommend watching as a three-hour binge, but one that I absolutely recommend watching. Ren Faire has real breakout potential, with its juicy, borderline unbelievable story, its cast of larger-than-life character featured in those larger-than-life close-ups and its absolute cacophony of quirkiness.
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RogerEbert.comMay 31, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Oppenheim latches onto the “Game of Thrones” aspect of this business almost to a fault. There’s a version of “Ren Faire” that grounds its drama in a world that feels less exaggerated merely by presenting a few more of the “normal” people around George and his successors. .... However, the insulated, tight POV in “Ren Faire” is intentional in that it makes us feel as crazy as George and keeps the series engaging in George's unpredictable immediacy.
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The Daily BeastJun 2, 2024
Jun 3, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The cutthroat intrigue is undeniably compelling, but the main characters seldom appear onscreen together, one of several holes in the storytelling. .... Regardless of what’s happening, the series is never not interesting to watch; disorienting camerawork, saturated colors, long close-ups on subjects’ faces twisted with anger, sorrow, and fear — even scenes in bland office spaces are compellingly shot.
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Jun 6, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Director Lance Oppenheim (whose credits include the recent Hulu documentary “Spermworld”) takes a stylized approach, giving the documentary an untrustworthy and manipulated feel that suggests a number of moments were staged. But it also seems likely that Coulam is too peculiar and stubborn — too lacking in self-awareness — to be anyone other than who he is, whether a camera is there or not.
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