Manufactured Landscapes Reviews
Top Critic
Window to the Movies
Burtynsky's awe-inspiring work ultimately speaks for itself.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
Combustible Celluloid
Each of Burtynsky's subjects is impressive in its scale, but terrifying in its ecological impact.
What the film does well is to make us part of the problem: After all we demand the lowest prices in everything we buy and that probably means it was made in China.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Oregonian
Burtynsky avoids any political content to his work, but it's hard not to feel anxious and sad at the spectacle of the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the world's most populous nation.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Austin Chronicle
My first question: What kind of nefarious events had to occur so that I could purchase the computer with which I write this review?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
One Guy's Opinion
Like Burtynsky's pictures, captures images that are at once awesome, humbling, and rather terrifying.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Deseret News, Salt Lake City
Documentarian Jennifer Baichwal's film finds a way to comment on ecological and environmental destruction without bludgeoning audiences with heavy-handed messages. There is a mesmerizing quality to the film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Burtynsky's photos are stunning (some of his images of dumps resemble Jackson Pollack's drip art), but what's most interesting about Landscapes is the tension between his work and the filmmaking.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky shoots the recycling dumps, superfactories, vast quarries and shipyards, capturing visual beauty in the ecological devastation.
| Original Score: 3/4
Burtynsky calls for "a whole new way of thinking" about the world's economy and ecology, though he never says what's wrong with the old way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie works best traveling from the eye straight to the conscience.
Metromix.com
Pulls real, enigmatic beauty out of the artificial.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Killer Movie Reviews
never stoops to easy scape-goating, nor to pat, politically correct answers. It is as engaging, as maddeningly thought-provoking, as it is beautiful
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Again and again, Baichwal tapers passages of her film toward resolution in the form of a finished picture by Burtynsky, telescoping her vision and his.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Opens with [an] extended moment: a 10-minute-long tracking shot of workers, rows and rows and rows of them, putting in their hours at a Chinese factory. It's an epic touch and reason enough to see this movie in a theater with a large screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Without browbeating, hectoring, lecturing or sermonizing, Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly. The point: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.
