Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) Reviews
CinePassion
Less interested in analyzing São Paulo's place in the shaky Brazilian system than in jacking it up with shorthand, gawk-at-the-foreigners shocks
ComingSoon.net
Tends to be rather disparate and all over the place ... examines the problems without offering any form of solution.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6.5/10
Filmcritic.com
borders on thoughtless
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Top CriticWe see where this is going early on; by the end, despite the film's beautiful cinematography, persuasive subjects and ironically upbeat soundtrack, we just feel bludgeoned.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Monsters and Critics
A predictable expose' of a foreign country with a dictatorship that encourages the most violent of crimes. But how far away is America?
| Original Score: 6/10
Reel.com
In the end, Kohn's one-note approach diminishes, rather than intensifies, the impact of Manda Bala.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
To address the economic inequality of teeming Sao Paulo, Brazil, documentary maker Jason Kohn has joined several loosely related topics into a sort of rhetorical doughnut, leaving a hole in the center where his thesis should be.
ReelTalk Movie Reviews
The concerns of 'Manda Bala' are admirable, but its selective reality is so far from almost any viewer's conceivable experience as to verge on caricature.
Slant Magazine
Shunning depth for cosmetic thrills, Kohn doesn't ask us to seriously think about Brazil's contemporary malaise, only to groove to it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Film Journal International
Peculiar structural decisions result in a documentary that alternates between mildly informative and grossly voyeuristic.
Las Vegas Weekly
Fascinating, and presented with such panache that you can't help but get drawn in.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
The director, a New Yorker of South American extraction named Jason Kohn, serves up a bewildering, yet seldom uninteresting, assortment of subjects.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
A documentary that works like a puzzle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Playback:stl
Despite the seriousness of the topic, Manda Bala may be the most visually creative film you will see this year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
PopMatters
Even with its occasional faults, Manda Bala does what documentaries do best - illuminate an intellectual or social situation that our otherwise narrow Western viewpoint would never even consider.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
eFilmCritic.com
The picture walks on air describing inexcusable violations of political faith and public safety, brilliantly forming a claustrophobic visual representation of a country struggling to live under the growing cancer of crime.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
WBAI Web Radio
Manda Bala effectively captures the enormous class divide in Third World Brazil, and the unarticulated simmering class tensions that the oblivious upper classes seem to take pains in denying.
KPBS.org
Kohn does a good job of bringing grim issues to light in a surprisingly entertaining manner. But maybe with a few more years of experience, he could make those issues resonate more fully.
| Original Score: 6/10
rec.arts.movies.reviews
In an account that is by turns funny, shocking, and revolting, director Jason Kohn documents the state of modern-day Brazil, ravaged by poverty, horrendous crime, and political corruption.
Full Review | Original Score: 7/10
