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Poster for Mao’s Last Dancer

Mao’s Last Dancer

Before you can fly, you have to be free.

2009 · 1h 57m · PG Drama, Romance
Directed by Bruce Beresford

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Overview

At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he falls in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
55%
Tomatometer
Fresh

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.

Jonathan F. Richards, Film.com
Fresh

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

Peter Brunette, Hollywood Reporter
Fresh

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

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Fresh

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

Tom Long, Detroit News
Rotten

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

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

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