Vladimir

Vladimir is brisk, easy to watch, and occasionally droll, but any higher aspirations have been brutally muted.

[An] over-long, repetitive, and scattershot affair which takes satiric aim at various targets and, to a tee, misses them all.

The whole thing falls flat, but really, Vladimir was never able to get it up.

Weisz aces the slapstick comedy of being hot and bothered in an inappropriate setting. But if “Vladimir” wants to prove erotic fixation can lead to artistic transcendence, it never fully walks the walk.

Netflix's "Vladimir" promises a steamy forbidden romance, but it fails to deliver, bogged down by curdled cynicism and tired clichés.

Much like M, it gets so caught up in proving its own relevancy, it overlooks the core principles of a good story. Obscurity awaits the show. Luckily, the book is still there, and infinitely better.

It flattens the complicated experience of desire into a boring and simple melodrama, sweeping its own leg pervasively over eight half-hour episodes.

As good as Weisz and the cast of Vladimir is, they’re trapped in a story that’s smothered in gimmickry instead of character development.

It comes as a surprising disappointment that the adaptation, a newly released eight-episode miniseries created by the book’s author and starring Rachel Weisz as the narrator (here given the initial “M.”), Leo Woodall (The White Lotus) as the eponymous Vladimir, and John Slattery (Mad Men) as the narrator’s husband John, is a pretty husk of the novel.