Blind Mountain Image
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Mixed or average reviews - based on 11 Critics What's this?

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  • Summary: Bax Xuemei is a young college graduate who yearns for a life as a budding urban capitalist but ends up drugged and sold as the bride of a rural brute. Beaten and raped by her new husband with the help of his parents, she tries desperately to escape but is trapped both by the closed culture and by the very remote location of the village. Unlike other kidnapped brides, she refuses to accept her fate even when she becomes pregnant, but her repeated escape attempts lead only to continuing brutality and betrayal. (Kino International) Collapse
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 11
  2. Negative: 1 out of 11
  1. Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    88
    Twenty years ago, Li's film might have served as a warning; today, it rues a dehumanizing economic system run rampant that leaves one sad slave wife to muse, "It's easy to die. It's living that's hard."
  2. This is a resolutely tough-minded, beautifully crafted film so compelling as to make bearable watching the nearly unbearable.
  3. Reviewed by: Derek Elley
    50
    Low on drama and originality, and high on deja vu, sophomore outing by writer-director Li Yang ("Blind Shaft," 2003).
  4. The movie not only indicts the country's embrace of capitalism by showing how low people will sink to make money, it also denigrates the agrarian class--once celebrated as heroic under Mao--by portraying its members as illiterate barbarians concerned only with continuing their family lines.

See all 11 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 2
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 2
  3. Negative: 0 out of 2
  1. MikeT
    9
    An extremely well-made film, at once tense, invigorating, and deeply depressing.
  2. GalenF.
    8
    Do not use my name, first or last. Utterly real. Hard to forget.