Great story! Shows how people overcome obstacles.

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.

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.

Roger Moore

Movie Nation

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.

Walter Addiego

San Francisco Chronicle