The Rider
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: April 13, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
85
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 43 Critic Reviews
Positive:
42
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Movie NationRoger MooreMay 9, 2018
The Rider is a docudrama as elegy, a slice of rodeo realism that both romanticizes and demythologizes the Cowboy Way in a corner of America where that still means something. Read full review
100
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonApr 26, 2018
The Rider is nothing short of a masterpiece, an elegant work of cinematic poetry that elevates the everyday struggles of real people to the level of high art. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Chandler LevackApr 26, 2018
Armed with an intimate tale and the true grit of Jandreau’s teeth, The Rider is the best film about searching for a new identity in the wreckage of the American dream since Kathryn Bigelow’s "The Hurt Locker" (2008). It is here to break your heart. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsApr 26, 2018
Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao’s The Rider is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I’ve had this year. Read full review
100
Boston GlobePeter KeoughApr 25, 2018
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayApr 18, 2018
Filmed with widescreen grandeur on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, The Rider reinvigorates tropes from the western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry. Read full review
100
TheWrapApr 12, 2018
Spiritual and earthy, forged in curiosity yet fortified with empathy, The Rider is why we go to the cinema, and it affirms Chloe Zhao as one of the most gifted new movie artists of our time. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comGodfrey CheshireApr 12, 2018
An account of rodeo riders on a South Dakota reservation, it is so fact-based that it almost qualifies as a documentary. Yet the film’s style, its sense of light and landscape and mood, simultaneously give it the mesmerizing force of the most confident cinematic poetry. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangApr 11, 2018
With its gorgeous frontier lyricism and its wrenchingly intimate story of a young man striving to fulfill what he considers his God-given purpose, The Rider comes as close to a spiritual experience as anything I've encountered in a movie theater this year. Read full review
100
The PlaylistBradley WarrenJun 1, 2017
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. Read full review
95
UproxxScott TobiasApr 12, 2018
It doesn’t matter what’s real and not real in The Rider. What matters is that it’s true. Read full review
95
The AtlanticDavid SimsApr 11, 2018
Zhao clearly understands that universal conflict between desire and reality, and with The Rider, she’s dramatized it beautifully. Read full review
91
IndieWireKate Erbland
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. Read full review
90
Film ThreatFilipe FreitasAug 30, 2018
An impressive documentary-style drama film, whose soulfulness and elegance dazzle. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzApr 26, 2018
The Rider is a beautiful movie, a Western of sorts that isn’t limited to that classification as it chronicles the life of a down-on-his-luck cowboy who simply keeps on living, as difficult as that sometimes can be. Read full review
90
Village VoiceBilge EbiriApr 12, 2018
Zhao takes a different approach, privileging the narrative, the poetry, and the realism in equal measure, blending them together to create something astonishingly powerful. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMay 26, 2017
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. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenApr 25, 2018
The Rider is a stunning piece of fiction played close to the bone. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldJun 11, 2018
Casting a dramatic film with nonactors is always a risky proposition; the fresh, natural presence of “real people” is sometimes outweighed by awkwardness when they have to deliver scripted dialogue. But Chloé Zhao’s dreamlike Western The Rider is one of those happy exceptions. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonMay 10, 2018
The kind of film that’s capable of eliciting wildly different reactions. Art-film aficionados would be impressed with its atmospheric storytelling and emphasis on character. Devotees of mainstream cinema would likely complain that “nothing happened.” Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Brad WheelerApr 12, 2018
Zhao’s artful look into the American West is a lightly brooding winner. Clearly this isn’t her first time at the rodeo. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversApr 12, 2018
Once The Rider hooks you – and believe me, it will – there's no way you will ever forget it. Read full review
84
Paste MagazineDom SinacolaMay 9, 2018
What cinematographer Joshua James Richards can do with a camera bears the weight of countless filmmakers in thrall to the pregnant possibility of this marvelous continent. Every frame of this film speaks of innumerable lives—passions and failures and tragedies and triumphs—unfolding unfathomably. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloApr 10, 2018
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. Read full review
83
The Film StageEd FranklMay 26, 2017
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. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Simran HansSep 18, 2018
Though it’s filmed like a romance, the moment feels captured, not staged. Read full review
80
CineVueAlasdair BaymanSep 13, 2018
The Rider speaks to a natural urge in humanity to aspire for more than we already have. Quietly breathtaking, although not flawless, Zhao is a true rising star with the skills evident to join the likes of Denis as a master filmmaker. Read full review
80
EmpireHelen O'HaraSep 10, 2018
A thoughtful and thought-provoking look at identity, aspiration and a precarious way of life, this is anchored by a stunning performance by Brady Jundreau and inspired direction by Chloé Zhao. Read full review
80
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottMay 23, 2018
While those aforementioned blockbusters offer a welcome dose of escapism, The Rider traffics in something considerably more affecting: authenticity. Read full review
80
CineVuePatrick GambleApr 12, 2018
A deeply felt personal journey, the film shifts seamlessly from unflinching realism to a poetic expression of masculinity in crisis; crossing back-and-forth across the blurred boundary that separates art and reportage to create a totally unforgettable film about the bond between people and place. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. ScottApr 11, 2018
Ms. Zhao’s commitment to her craft — she knows how to take care and when to take risks — matches Brady’s. She has an eye for landscape and an acute sensitivity to the nuances of storytelling, a bold, exacting vision that makes The Rider exceptional among recent American regional-realist films. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 26, 2017
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. Read full review
80
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganMay 26, 2017
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. Read full review
75
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonApr 26, 2018
It all adds up to a handsome, engrossing slice-of-life movie with the feel of a Western, inventive and unique. The Rider desegregates a genre that typically presents cowboys and Indians as separate and opposing forces – archetypes unified here in one remarkable individual. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleWalter AddiegoApr 18, 2018
The movie is a rendering of the internal landscape of a contemporary cowboy, with the complexities and ambiguities left intact. It’s a kind of parable, delivered in a manner that has nothing to do with preaching. Read full review
75
The Associated PressLindsey BahrApr 11, 2018
Its examination of the cowboy masculinity that leads Brady and his peers to seek a life of thrills and danger only scratches the surface, but you’ll be surprised at how intoxicating and enveloping it is, right down to the on-the-nose metaphors. Read full review
70
Vanity FairK. Austin CollinsApr 25, 2018
Despite its pure beauty, in other words, there’s no mistaking The Rider for a simple, crowd-pleasing pick-me-up. The movie is soulful, elegant, filmed as often as not at the magic hour, when the sky is as broad as it is orange-yellow, and every nook of the world seems alight with possibility. It is hardly, on its surface, an outright downer. But it’s unmistakably a movie about loss. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternApr 12, 2018
This poetic, laconic and ineffably beautiful drama has an unerring feel for its subject, a young cowboy struggling against his implacable fate in the American West. That’s notable in itself, and all the more so since the film was written and directed by Chloé Zhao, a Chinese woman born in Beijing. Read full review
70
SlateInkoo KangApr 12, 2018
The film makes its primary case eloquently and elegiacally: The only thing more lonesome than a cowboy, surveying a land where no one understands him, is that same cowboy without a horse. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)Emily YoshidaJun 7, 2017
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. Read full review
70
VarietyGuy LodgeMay 26, 2017
Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineSam C. Mac
It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin. Read full review
40
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJan 18, 2024
The failure of The Rider to see Brady in his intellectual and experiential specificity, to render him as interesting as the dramatic shell in which Zhao places him, is a failure of directorial imagination. Read full review
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