80
Has the punch of a good Western with a clean and direct script plus an adventurous use of songs and folk paintings.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
A third aspect of The Tracker is less successful. In a badly calculated move, Mr. de Heer and singer Graham Tardif fill the soundtrack with songs full of clichés, platitudes, and truisms.
90
Think of an Anthony Mann Western made by an experimental film director and you get an indication of the challenging components of The Tracker, the story of a manhunt that is politically sensitive because of its depiction of atrocities perpetrated on aboriginals by a fanatical white cop.
38
New York Daily News by Jami Bernard
An underwritten drama.
60
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
The film's bleakly inevitable ending packs a wallop and its hauntingly desolate images linger long after the story is told.
75
New York Post by Megan Lehmann
Dialogue is sparse in this leisurely paced chase; instead, the bluesy vocals of indigenous singer Archie Roach -- singing de Heer's lyrics -- are layered over the action as a kind of musical narration.
60
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
A decent little exercise in nativist outrage, Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, with its dynamic between indigene and colonial oppressor, could've easily been a western.
50
Gulpilil, a solid cast, and gorgeous scenery keep The Tracker watchable, but they can't mask the fact that as an adventure, it's sluggish, and as a film about racism, it's often reductive and clumsy.
70
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.