Reseñas de Metacritic

Focusing on the indigenous community of the Pine Ridge reservation, Zhao reimagines the entrenched masculine persona of the cowboy. The result is an entrancing, deeply moving effort, one that is certain to steal the hearts of audiences on its wider release.

Utilizing a cast of non-actors — most of whom are tasked with playing versions of themselves, in a story pulled from their lives — Zhao’s film derives its power from the truth that both drives it and inspires it, and the final result is a wholly unique slice-of-life drama.

The Rider is a rare gem, a small, acutely observed portrait of a few lives on what used to be the frontier but is now a desolate backwater, the windswept badlands around Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

Zhao’s combination of the visual palette of Terrence Malick, the social backbone of Kelly Reichardt, and the spontaneity of John Cassavetes creates cinema verité in the American plains.

More retroactive documentary than docudrama, it’s remarkably effective at creating a sense of verisimilitude, and these non-actors seem far more comfortable in their own skin.

This is a movie using non-professionals playing versions of themselves, and under Zhao’s patient, unintrusive directorial eye they appear to be inhabiting a kind of heightened documentary.

To say the performances are authentic is clearly stating the point, but the Blackburn family opens up to give an easily intimate portrait of themselves.

Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.

In telling the story of a disappearing slice of America, Zhao has created a portrait of resilience, and the bonds that last even after the rodeo’s over.

It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin.