This attempt to say something about the struggle between humans and wild animals is too bombastic and unfeeling.

| Jan 10, 2018

Warns us that an old-fashioned way of life is passing to an encroaching civilization.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 24, 2017

While visually stunning, this Chinese French collaboration is melodramatic and narratively disjointed. It is a man-and-his-dog story meets outsider-learning-to-appreciate-a-new culture story, just set in a place unfamiliar to Western audiences.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2016

if the film has a true star, it is the environment itself, which is enormous and daunting, dangerous, yet serene

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 22, 2015

A true story that manages to seem both mythical and too fantastic to have really happened, Jean-Jacques Annaud's epic 3-D Wolf Totem is ultimately a hymn and a plea for ecological harmony.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 17, 2015

The greatest aspect of "Wolf Totem" is the gorgeous, sweeping cinematography that captures the landscape in breathtaking aerial shots and crystal-clear color. The story has its touching moments but dissolves into disjointed melodrama.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 14, 2015

The four-legged creatures are more compelling than their two-legged counterparts in this visually stunning 3D adventure.

| Sep 11, 2015

Annaud and company make a bold environmental statement cloaked in a personal story of one young man's personal growth, change and awareness.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 11, 2015

Though Wolf Totem is notable for being a Chinese-scripted-and-shot film that actually offers some kind of critique of the communists, it nevertheless falls into a fairly well-worn story of an outsider growing to appreciate a culture he's come to change.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 11, 2015

Presented in IMAX 3D, there are scenes in this film that are literally breathtaking when they are not capturing or breaking the heart.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 11, 2015

Something ends up lost in translation. Its aspirations of looking and feeling recognizable end up uncomfortable and embarrassing.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 11, 2015

There's no denying the beauty of the film's imagery, violent and tender, or the emotional power of the final moment in the boy-and-his-dog love story.

| Sep 10, 2015

Characters seem carved from a much larger narrative. The landscape and painstakingly trained wolves are the true stars.

| Sep 10, 2015

Annaud's adaptation of Jiang Rong's Chinese novel is a visual wonder but a dramatic dud, a cut-and-paste mess of plot snippets, illuminated by the occasional inspired visual conceit.

| Sep 10, 2015

At the film's core is a quirky love story between the student and the orphan wolf cub he finds and raises.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 10, 2015

Epic in scope, yet at the same time intensely intimate in its handling of its protagonist's inner life, it's a unique wildlife tale that sets a tribe of humans against a majestic pack of wolves.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2015

It becomes difficult to separate the natives from their communist masters in terms of their treatment of their natural surroundings.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 10, 2015

If it strives too hard for weighty import, Wolf Totem remains an occasionally stirring portrait of Mongolia's wolf population.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Sep 10, 2015

Among the outstanding set pieces, the most spectacular is a battle between the wolf pack and mounted herders trying to control a horse stampede in the middle of a blizzard.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2015

Worth seeing just for a spectacular sequence depicting the wolves chasing a herd of prize horses toward a frozen lake during a blinding snowstorm - which appears to have been shot with minimal computer-generated fakery.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2015