- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100This first-cabin director returns to top form, with this revelatory film his best in years. More than that, Mao's Last Dancer is a masterpiece.
-
80Will appeal to upscale adult audiences with its mix of gorgeous Chinese locations, splendid dance sequences and compelling personal story.
-
75Likable as this full-hearted and uplifting movie is, though, I wish that Beresford had not fallen into the familiar trap of dividing Chinese characters into two roles: brutal, ideology-spouting apparatchiki; or parable-spouting, salt-of-the-earth proletarians, the better to show off by contrast the open society of the West.
-
75This is a handsome, conventional biopic, as fluent and polished as its subject matter.
-
75The delight of this film isn't so much in the tale as the telling.
-
70The story lights up when world-class performer Chi Cao leaps about as the adult Li, but is marred by lumpy melodrama when the music stops.
-
70The film celebrates artistic freedom without preaching a sermon, and often flies when Mr. Chi is on screen. When he is on stage, spinning and leaping to the strains of magnificent music, the film soars.
-
63This based-on-real-life tale of artistic aspirations and international politics is packed with more corn than an Iowa silo.
-
63The ballets are badly filmed. The camera shoots them often from the point of view of the patrons in the auditorium or in a way that dishonors the choreography.
-
63Chairman Mao wouldn't necessarily approve. And even today, China won't be showing Mao's Last Dancer.
-
63Three actors portray the clumsy-but-limber Li in the years of his arduous training, when he is pulled between a teacher who's inspired by Mao and another who's inspired by bootleg videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov.
-
Like most films in this underdog genre, the emotional manipulation of the audience is constant and obvious.
-
60The degree to which they are willing to share their bodies with the world, seeming to reach out for it with each impossible extension, drawing it in with every reeling arabesque, suggests a desire for engagement that is visceral, human, and true in all the ways this film is not.
-
60It's hard to know whether to take it to task as a film critic or as a dance critic. It isn't that it fails on either level - it's a serviceable movie - but it neither attempts nor achieves much of value.
-
Director Bruce Beresford ("Driving Miss Daisy") knows how to tug heartstrings but as he moves the inspirational material toward its tear-jerker finale, it's often hampered by awkward melodrama.
-
50A dramatic true story has been made into a diffident biopic.
-
50There are nice cameos by Joan Chen and Kyle MacLachlan as Li's mother and lawyer, respectively.
-
50While this is hardly "Breaker Morant," it's nowhere near as mawkish or cloying as it could have been.
-
Based on the memoirs of Li Cunxin, Mao's Last Dancer means well, but it stumbles between genres.
-
50It's artless, obvious, and at times insultingly exaggerated. And yet the real-life story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin, based on his autobiography, is often dramatic enough to win its way past the silly trappings.
-
40Noble but dull.
-
40The performance sequences feel intimate and exhilarating-but in the end, Li's journey is compelling only when he's onstage.
-
30The final image - a freeze frame of a pas de deux staged to resemble a triumphal Communist poster - perfectly captures the film's overall effect: it's strenuously brainless.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 5 out of 6
-
Mixed: 1 out of 6
-
Negative: 0 out of 6
-
9
-
10
-
A well-made, well-acted and interesting adaptation of the true story that is just as good as the book.