| Original Score: B | Feb 18, 2012

Woefully creaky and corny.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 12, 2010

Bruce Beresford's biopic of Li Cunxin, the Chinese ballet dancer who defected while on a student visa in Houston in 1981, is sometimes the movie equivalent of Oscar Meyer cold cuts. But the dancing is pure caviar.

| Sep 21, 2010

Feel-good movie about a Chinese dancer presses all the right buttons.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2010

Australian director Bruce Beresford handles the culture-clash aspects of the story with a surprising lack of subtlety.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 3, 2010

Beresford and the entire cast cover the proceedings with a light touch and just the right amount of gravitas (given the situation).

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 3, 2010

Beresford can't even represent Li's dancing (the reason we're meant to root for this little foreigner that could in the first place) with a modicum of dynamism.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 30, 2010

Lovely and astounding, Mao's Last Dancer is a modern epic of art and ambition triumphing oppression.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 27, 2010

Too often, though, the film plods along on the ground.

| Aug 27, 2010

Ballet star Li Cunxin's best-selling autobiography gets a curiously tepid treatment in this 2009 adaptation by director Bruce Beresford.

| Aug 27, 2010

Ballet dancer Chi Cao does a great job of capturing both Li's chops on the stage and his sincerity and culture shock in the face of American opulence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 27, 2010

Hollywood has a long history of turning highbrow art into middlebrow mush, and Mao's Last Dancer is just one more kick dancer in that long line.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 26, 2010

Recounts the true story of Chinese ballet star Li Cunxin's defection to the US in the schmaltziest 온라인카지노추천-movie terms imaginable.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 23, 2010

Comes alive in the ballets, which convey not only the creative energy of their own story-telling but the ultimate expression of the performers' passion for their art.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 22, 2010

A well-intentioned slice of melodrama but all the good intentions in the world can't hide the film's many, many flaws.

| Aug 20, 2010

Many films have portrayed the rigors of ballet training, but none will make viewers wince quite like Mao's Last Dancer.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 20, 2010

The 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.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 20, 2010

Mao's Last Dancer is an appealing and, by its end, quite moving film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 19, 2010

The 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.

Full Review | Aug 19, 2010

Bruce Beresford, the veteran director of such Oscar fare as Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy, apparently didn't know when to quit, overplaying the already hokey script at every turn. And at every pirouette and plié.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 19, 2010