When at its best, cinema transports its audience to another time and place, freeing the throngs of weary cubicle-dwellers from the throes of their everyday existence. A film usually does this in one of two ways: by providing a penetrating look at our own world that is somehow more real than the reality it portrays, or by offering entry into a fantasy realm—a world of imagination recognizable by virtue of its being unrecognizable. The Cave of the Yellow Dog, a genre-blurring docudrama about a real family scratching out a traditional existence on the desolate plains of Mongolia, does both.

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