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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
25
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
RogerEbert.comMay 4, 2022
The Daily BeastMay 5, 2022
Season 1 Review:
There’s a richness to The Staircase that’s partly due to Michael’s multifaceted and winding odyssey—before and after trial—and partly the result of Campos’ expert approach, which incorporates virtually every important aspect of this story, evokes dread, ambiguity and topsy-turviness via meticulous long-take tracking shots, and sharply delineates every one of its numerous principals and their hopelessly fraught dynamics.
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May 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
This series is more concerned with asking questions than with making statements. It follows the evidence where it leads: What’s refreshing is that that evidence is less about guilt or innocence in a case on which the court has ruled, but about the strangeness and unknowability of the human heart.
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May 6, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Colin Firth burns with intensity in this nail-biting true-crime series that keeps you guessing if a bisexual novelist, politician, former marine and frequent liar pushed his wife (Toni Collette) to her death down the family staircase or whether she fell by accident.
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May 5, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Exceptionally good. Amid a river of true-crime dramatizations featuring big names side-eyeing their co-stars while contemplating murder, or their characters’ tragically misunderstood innocence, this one knows what it’s doing. It sets a tone, gets everybody in the same movie and focuses on character interaction in long, fluid takes, glance by glance, bizarre development by development.
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May 6, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Through this churn of grief-stricken family turmoil and legal strategizing, The Staircase has begun a treacherous ascent toward saying something truly meaningful. It’s messy and massive in both scope and ambition. But whether that effort will be enough to justify retrying this case remains to be seen.
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Jun 27, 2022
May 6, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It’s hard to imagine gleaning something new from a subject that’s already been explored via multiple hours of television. But The Staircase, which casts Colin Firth in the role of Michael and Toni Collette as Kathleen, defies expectations, adding new perspective and dimension to a well-known story while creating an experience that differs from the docuseries.
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May 5, 2022
Season 1 Review:
As Michael Peterson, Colin Firth manages to make us think he’s guilty as hell one minute, and possibly innocent the next. Toni Collette is touching as Kathleen. And while many a series has caused eyes to glaze over when the plot shifts to younger characters, the dynamics among grown children in this extended family are consistently absorbing.
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Apr 27, 2022
Season 1 Review:
With additional context comes an even greater sense that no secondhand account of what happened on that staircase—whether generated by the prosecution, the defense, or Lestrade—will ever approach the objective truth. The linchpin of this delicate portrayal is Colin Firth’s performance as Michael. ... Although the multiple graphic set pieces that dramatize various theories of how Kathleen died struck me as excessively invasive, for the most part, the flashbacks work to restore her personhood.
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May 3, 2022
Season 1 Review:
This is a well-written drama with clearly defined characters, but it still took me a couple of episodes to figure out everyone’s place on the complicated family tree. ... Toni Collette gives Kathleen a voice through the flashback sequences, and the young actors playing their children are all excellent. “The Staircase” keeps us in its grips throughout.
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The IndependentApr 27, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Campos brings visual panache to the project – interspersing, for example, scenes of a fundraiser for Peterson’s abortive mayoral campaign with a walkthrough of the crime scene by a squad of forensic experts – but can never quite surmount the old aphorism that truth is stranger than fiction.
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May 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It's a complicated case, one that probably deserved its eight episodes to lay out properly, but Mr. Campos hardly makes economical use of his time. The frequent flashings back and forth in time are confusing, the relationships between Peterson family members are never sufficiently explained. ... Mr. Firth and Ms. Collette, as the loving couple who may have hated each other, are playing complex characters with Emmy-worthy aplomb. ... But they find themselves in the middle of a messy business.
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May 4, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Firth and Collette are “good,” I guess, and so is the rest of the cast, from Michael Stuhlbarg as the defense attorney David Rudolf to Sophie Turner as Margaret Ratliff, but there is just nothing here to draw interest, much less sustain it, and good actors with no material are like jugglers having to pantomime the balls. Impressive, but only for about 10 seconds. In two words, this is dull fare.
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