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Mao's Last Dancer

✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Australia · 2009
Rated PG · 1h 57m
Director Bruce Beresford
Starring Chi Cao, Chengwu Guo, Wen Bin Huang, Joan Chen
Genre Drama, Romance

An inspiring portrait of Li Cunxin, who, at the age of 11, is taken from his rural Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to study ballet in Beijing. As a young cultural exchange student, he defects to the United States, where he falls in love with an American woman.

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What are critics saying?

50

Village Voice by

Based on the memoirs of Li Cunxin, Mao's Last Dancer means well, but it stumbles between genres.

40

Time Out by Eric Hynes

The performance sequences feel intimate and exhilarating-but in the end, Li's journey is compelling only when he's onstage.

60

Movieline by Michelle Orange

The 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.

100

Observer by Rex Reed

This 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.

50

The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson

It'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.

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