Critic Reviews

The storytelling is exceptional — Cuarón writes sublimely about family dynamics, sexual jealousy and the definitive lies that we tell to those closest to us and the greater ones we tell, ultimately, to ourselves. It’s thoughtful, disturbing, thrilling and sometimes even overwhelmingly good. Just don’t call it TV.

It is a story told with such dramatic force it might leave you bowled over. It might leave you cold and wondering. It might leave you angry. But it will leave you thinking about it. Maybe for a long time.

Some formal choices guide you toward the truth, while other cues are deliberate red herrings, hooking you on a line that leads right back to your own rod. In the end, I expect more than a few bitter reactions to Cuarón’s most provocative project since “Y tu mamá también.” But no one can argue they went in unprepared.

The performances are uniformly excellent, but the strength of Disclaimer’s two-part premiere is in the production, an edit that flows seamlessly across different timelines with unique color palettes, narration POVs, and tones.

Ms. Blanchett, Mr. Cohen and the predictably glorious Ms. Manville are all wonderful—there are moments that are startling in their frankness and genuine emotion; “Disclaimer” may prove a watershed in the gravitation of grown-up cinema to television, out of the Marvel universe of the multiplex and into a realm where someone like Mr. Cuarón and company can construct a story that deserves seven parts to tell.

The TV event series of the new season exposes the lies a celebrated documentarian (a knockout Cate Blanchett) tells her husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) and herself about a novelist (Kevin Kline, Emmy worthy) who writes about a shocking sex scandal from her youth that only pretends to be fiction.

Disclaimer challenges our perceptions of truth while delivering an edge-of-the-seat psychological thriller. [28 Oct - 17 Nov 2024, p.4]

“Disclaimer” is tremendously acted and directed and designed with painstaking detail.

No one comes to “Disclaimer” looking for solemnity, nor will you find it. Instead, it’s an elegantly woven tapestry of torment, which grips you by the head and forces you to stare at the trainwreck of two people’s lives, caught in the riptide of pain.

The series has a rich texture, both tactile and dreamy. When the story wades into the hot-button issue of cancellation, it stumbles. But its emotional arithmetic is just right: heightened to near melodrama while also dreadfully credible.