| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 1, 2006

Mixes environmental awareness and spiritual mindfulness with its chase scenes through grand scenery.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 3, 2006

Breathtakingly beautiful, breathtakingly brutal and simply breathtaking.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 26, 2006

Instead of a laudable ecological crusade, the film feels more like a futile Captain Ahab obsession, with patrol leader Ri Tai (Duobujie) vainly chasing a poaching kingpin through the harsh, windy wilderness.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 12, 2006

| Original Score: A- | May 6, 2006

One of the most beautiful and disturbing widescreen epics in last year's Seattle International Film Festival.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 5, 2006

What is remarkable is that this film is based on a true story, and filmed on the actual locations.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 5, 2006

A nomadic life-and-death struggle evoking classic Hollywood western themes of dogged honor and rugged idealism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 4, 2006

This second film by Chinese director Lu Chuan is a solid and atmospheric drama.

Full Review | May 2, 2006

Despite the far-off locale, we soon feel surprisingly comfortable, merely because of the film's shape.

Full Review | May 2, 2006

Never has a movie so soberingly made the fight to save life and the struggle to hold on to it seem so futile.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 28, 2006

Other than raising awareness for endangered wildlife, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili doesn't have anything profound to say, but it has a lot to show.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 21, 2006

The most crucial element of Mountain Patrol's success is Duo's portrayal of Ri Tai, a tough, terse hero who could have sprung fully formed from the imagination of Akira Kurosawa or Sergio Leone.

| Apr 20, 2006

The spirit of the hardboiled American Westerns of the 1950s wends its way through this moody, panoramic Chinese chase thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 14, 2006

The stunning adventure Mountain Patrol: Kekexili is like a John Ford western set, not in the master's beloved Monument Valley, but in remotest China.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 14, 2006

Being in this pitiless environment stiffens the spine of the film's tale.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 13, 2006

Based on depressingly true events, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili tracks the heroic efforts of a small group of Tibetans struggling to keep the Tibetan antelope from extinction.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 13, 2006

The film's somber beauty is recommendation enough, but the way political, personal, and symbolic tensions seethe silently below the surface turn it into riveting drama.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Apr 13, 2006

For better or worse, no film of the last decade, not even Malick's The New World, has displayed such a ferocious intimacy with extreme landscape.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2006

Ranks alongside Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness as one of the most succinct and distressing expressions of landscape in crisis.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 5, 2006