As enjoyable a documentary as I've seen this past couple of years, Buck is a lively portrait of Buck Brannaman, an altogether remarkable Montana cowboy now aged around 60, who spends 40 weeks a year driving around the States from Maine to California putting on clinics to help people handle and understand their horses. His loving mother died when he was 12, leaving him and his brother in the care of a violent, overbearing alcoholic father, from whom they were taken by the law and handed over to sympathetic foster parents. From this traumatic experience he learned how to treat people and animals, and there is something beautiful about the way he deals with horses and their owners. He was an adviser on Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer and, so one gathers, virtually took over the direction of a key sequence in which a wary horse and its troubled owner (played by Scarlett Johansson) are brought together. In a particularly poignant sequence Buck has to give up on a horse that was brain-damaged at birth and, through lack of proper treatment, turned into a dangerous predator. Guy Mossman and Luke Geissbühler's cinematography is almost as beautiful as Robert Richardson's in The Horse Whisperer.