Mao's Last Dancer [Blu-ray] Reviews

A lovely, heartrending biography of expatriate Chinese dancer Li Cunxin, Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer impresses as both a human story and a dance film. Beautifully designed, superbly cast, and expertly shot, the film brings to wider attention the moving story of a child taken from home at age eleven and trained for dance only to run into pressures from both East and West as his talent burgeons and the lures of freedom of artistic expression and celebration of one’s individuality bring about major life changes. While the story becomes necessarily fragmented in the second half, the first half of the film is as fine a screen biography as has ever been presented, and the fact that it’s about a celebrity whose notoriety happened in the 1980s allows the passage of time to work its magic on us to allow us to see the story unfold with fresh eyes.

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