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Positive:
40
Mixed:
6
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
IndieWireMay 26, 2017
Season 2 Review:
China Girl is an even more nuanced, more primal, and more entertaining beast than the first season (or just about anything else that’s ever aired on television). It’s an overwhelmingly ambitious and unforgettably thoughtful piece of fiction that’s told with the lightest of touches ... and brought to life by a cast that lacks a single weak link.
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Mar 15, 2013
Season 1 Review:
This haunting New Zealand miniseries boasts a strong, tense performance from Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss as a detective, but it's very much the work of director Jane Campion. [25 Mar 2013, p.44]
Sep 11, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Some of the most mesmerizing hours of television all year. [15 Sep 2017, p.66]
Uncle BarkySep 6, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Not everything entirely adds up during the very winding course of China Girl’s six hours. ... The performances, however, are uniformly on target. Kidman, part of the recent ensemble in HBO’s Emmy-nominated Big Little Lies, is even more impressive here as the possessive, high-strung Julia while Dencik completely inhabits the role of thoroughly oily “Puss.” Moss again is impressively nuanced as the unsteady Robin, whose flaws and needs are palpable.
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The Daily BeastMay 30, 2013
Mar 18, 2013
Season 1 Review:
By rooting Top of the Lake in the real, Campion gives her more fanciful inspirations legs, and the mystery--which is, needless to say, not merely or even mostly the mystery of a missing girl--room to breathe. I have no idea where any of it's headed. But I am going along.
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Sep 11, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Characters alive enough to care for. (Alive enough that you would prefer they think a minute and make the smart decision, even at the price of writing the series out of existence. Mostly they won't, fortunately, but sometimes they will--also fortunately.) Once you're in it, you're in for the duration.
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UPROXXSep 6, 2017
Season 2 Review:
It doesn’t quite stack up to the original, in part because the lake town itself was such a huge part of the first series, in part because some of the coincidences that drive both stories play more convincingly in a small community than in a big city. But the acting is remarkable.
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TV Guide MagazineMar 18, 2013
Season 1 Review:
Top of the Lake is reminiscent of AMC's The Killing in ways both good (its moodiness) and unfortunate--Robin has a fiancé back home who keeps pleading for her to return--but its world is so specific and transcendently trippy, haunted by mythic legends rooted in this unforgiving geography, that it feels wondrously fresh, alien and unforgettable.
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Mar 15, 2013
Sep 8, 2017
Season 2 Review:
While the first two episodes of Top of the Lake focus on Robin’s complicated, unfortunate past, the clues in the murder story unfold very slowly--probably too slowly for American audiences--but when they finally do, the series, directed by Jane Campion (“The Piano”), picks up some steam.
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Sep 5, 2017
Season 2 Review:
The coincidence-laden plot, the floating suitcase, a few moments of character inconsistency and a really bad, mad decision on how the series ends, cannot be overlooked, of course, but these are far outweighed by the overall power of the series, the strength of the performance and most of all what Campion wants us to understand about identity and expectations of others.
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Sep 6, 2017
Season 2 Review:
This one lacks the original’s intuitive sense of rhythm and organization, and often seems more scattered and digressive than multilayered. And instead of letting feminist themes emerge organically from its situations, it stuffs them into every nook and cranny of every scene, mostly via dialogue instead of the sorts of hypnotically intense, even primal images that distinguished the original.
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Sep 12, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Set against this much more conventional backdrop, the holes in Campion’s detective story are clearer, but the story and the dialogue have been heightened to the point of absurdist theater, as if to compensate. ... The ending of the final episode points to a third installment of Top of the Lake, although at this point fans of the first season might be more inclined to pretend the second never happened.
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