85
Metascore
13 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100CineVueMatthew AndersonCineVueMatthew AndersonA galling, distressing but enthralling documentary.
- 90Film ThreatFilm ThreatThrough Wang’s intimate and gifted storytelling, and her filmmaking abilities, she offers a lens of understanding to the delicate nature of life and death, especially for the frontline men and women who were tackling this faceless and mysterious illness changing life as we know it.
- 90TheWrapCarlos AguilarTheWrapCarlos AguilarOnce Wang gets into the murky waters of the hoaxers here, one wishes she could dig deeper and examine the evolution of those fringe factions at length. That unfortunately doesn’t happen — likely given how much ground there is to cover with this story — yet her hard-hitting doc, both explores complex ideological battles and maps how a humanitarian calamity morphed into a political one in both countries.
- 88Slant MagazineChuck BowenSlant MagazineChuck BowenIn Wang Nanfu’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.
- 80The GuardianCharles BramescoThe GuardianCharles BramescoBusiness as usual has largely resumed in Wuhan, but Wang’s film contends that that’s just the problem. The same apparatuses of messaging and censorship are still in operation, ensuring that the full extent of the malfeasance may never be fully known
- 80The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyThe Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyEven when accessing the situation remotely via camera operators and citizen journalists on the ground, Wang deftly balances factoids with first-hand experiences to show the emotional cost, both for people unable to say goodbye to their loved ones and front-line health care workers and funeral home staff, absorbing the trauma of unrelenting losses.
- 75The Film StageDavid KatzThe Film StageDavid KatzWhat emerges most clearly, in Wang’s argument, is the pandemic being as much of a battle between citizens and their lawmakers, as against humanity versus an ever-mutating virus.
- 75IndieWireEric KohnIndieWireEric KohnWang’s absorbing first-person account of the coronavirus outbreak initially seems like it’s treading familiar ground, tracking the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan and government propaganda efforts to pretend it’s under control. With time, however, Wang turns the tables on her Western audience, illustrating how those same lies emanated from American airwaves months later.
- 70VarietyOwen GleibermanVarietyOwen GleibermanThe film’s form is glancing, exploratory, open to the moment. Yet Nanfu Wang captures things that other documentaries leave out, like the private emotions bred by policies of neglect. And her theme, in the end, is larger than you think. It’s that big governments failed to control the virus because their real investment was in controlling everything else.