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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
32
Mixed:
5
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Working alongside co-showrunner Don McKellar (of the underrated Canadian series Sensitive Skin), Park has crafted a vibrant, faithful yet often audacious Sympathizer, premiering April 14, that matches executive producer Nguyen’s brilliant novel in both ambition and execution.
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Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The show’s depiction of what it was like to leave Saigon just before the end of the war is some of the year’s most harrowing, captivating television. It’s truly transportive television, the kind of show that really does open your eyes to a new perspective on the world — and keeps you surprised the entire time.
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May 7, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It’s a spy thriller, a satire of colonialism and its many faces — many of them Robert Downey Jr.’s — and an exploration of the complications of love and memory. But it’s also an intense dialogue and argument with the movies. It is simultaneously its own Vietnam War movie, bold, inventive and sometimes bloody, as well as a pointed, detailed work of movie criticism.
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TV Guide MagazineApr 23, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Come for the stunt, to marvel at the versatility of Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr inhabiting multiple extravagant roles, recalling Peter Sellers' tour de force in Dr. Strangelove. Stay to get immersed in the suspenseful saga of an unnamed half-Vietnamese, half-French antihero. [22 Apr - 12 May 2024, p.4]
ColliderApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
There is a certain prestige quality to The Sympathizer that distinguishes it from most other current series, alongside its willingness to challenge viewers with complicated characters and stories. It’s that same fearlessness that many HBO original series successfully captured in the late 2000s, continuing throughout the next decade of titles. To put it simply, The Sympathizer is a future television classic.
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Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Succeeding as both an almost academic inquisition into the nebulous nature of racial identity and a raucous spy tale, as well as a high-speed comedy and a dark, biting drama. .... Inch by inch, he [The Captain] loses himself—and Xuande makes sure that we feel every agonizing moment of his slow self-destruction.
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The GuardianMay 28, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The only downside to all this is that, on occasion, it feels like it has blown all of its emotional budget on style rather than substance. .... For the most part, though, The Sympathizer is exciting, meaty and a reminder that drama that demands your full and complete attention can be well worth the effort.
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The IndependentMay 28, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Between Downey’s character-juggling, the constantly time-skipping narrative structure, and a snappy, hair gel-slick aesthetic sensibility, it would be easy to write off The Sympathizer as being more style than substance. But make no mistake, this is a series that is really about something, that tackles expansive subject matter with clarity and verve.
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Apr 15, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Those fiddly shades of gray — the series’ best — necessarily recede as the plot progresses. The last episodes are inferior to the first three (which Park Chan-wook directed). That’s not a condemnation. It was probably inevitable that this show’s extraordinary visual and narrative confidence would falter as it tried to square the ideological schema in which its characters operate with the wonderfully messy story about them it produced.
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Apr 15, 2024
Season 1 Review:
While the series concentrates on the powerful — and formerly powerful — Park also does a fine job of evoking the ordinary, healthy community around them, establishing itself anew at various events and gatherings. It’s not a world we’ve seen in a big-budget, big-deal TV series; there are more stories to tell there.
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Apr 15, 2024
Season 1 Review:
But even when The Sympathizer falls apart, the show’s failures are almost as fun as the triumphs — they have meat to them. They’re the result of someone making a choice. The series is at its best when Park’s visuals and narrative devices clearly articulate everything going on under the story’s hood. It’s rare an essay prompt feels this fun.
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Apr 15, 2024
Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
He’s [Hoa Xuande] great. Even with that performance, those visuals, and that sense of humor, there are occasions — particularly in the finale, which largely takes place at the reeducation camp — where The Sympathizer, like its hero, gets too lost in its own head. More often than not, though, it works very well, despite the high degree of difficulty that would come with any adaptation of the book.
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Radio TimesApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It’s not just Apocalypse Now and Platoon that are dissected here, but the jingoistic, exploitative and unrepresentative nature of so many war films. However, the truly exceptional attribute the show has is that while it excels in this, it is also a detailed, evocative and emotional character study, which really gets under the skin of its protagonist.
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LooperApr 10, 2024
Apr 12, 2024RogerEbert.comApr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The first three episodes are likely locks for various Emmy nominations. However, as soon as Fernando Meirelles ("City of God") and Marc Munden ("The Secret Garden") take over directorial duties, “The Sympathizer” falters. What was once enthralling becomes merely competent; most of all, the latter two directors lack Park’s audacious levity. Nonetheless, “The Sympathizer” is a riveting watch.
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Apr 15, 2024
Season 1 Review:
There’s going to be a lot of quirky characters, a lot of stylistic filmmaking techniques used, and a very solid sense of place and time that permeates the entire narrative. That tends to be a good thing, and it will serve this narrative well. We just hope that The Sympathizer doesn’t get distracted by its gimmicks and focuses on Captain’s story.
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Apr 10, 2024
Season 1 Review:
This version of The Sympathizer is still substantive and audacious, a slab of satire and deeply felt human tragedy that’s worthy of conversation and consideration, even if the consideration leads to the conclusion that a kitchen-sink approach that worked on the page struggles to coalesce on the screen.
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Apr 15, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Overly complicated, overly stylized and often boring, Park and co-creator Don McKellar can't coalesce the series' shifting timelines, disparate characters, cartoonish costuming and moral ambiguity into a story that pulls you in. It's a whole lot of stuff shoved in your face with very little resonance to show.
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