100
Salon by Andrew O'Hehir
Manufactured Landscapes may tell you more about how the 21st century world actually works than you really want to know, but it's a heartbreaking, beautiful, awful and awesome film.
Manufactured Landscapes
Critic Rating
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A striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.
Stream Manufactured Landscapes
What are critics saying?
100
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Jennifer Baichwal's gorgeous documentary Manufactured Landscapes amplifies the powerful work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of terrain transformed by civilization into rivers and tides of industrial ugliness.
100
TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox
Burtynsky's keen sense of color, pattern and composition are obvious from his work, but equally acute are his thoughts on how he as an artist as well as an inhabitant of the planet fits into the larger scheme of things.
100
Boston Globe by Staff (Not Credited)
An eloquent ecological warning.
100
San Francisco Chronicle by Kenneth Baker
Leaves its audience with many troubling questions. Among them: Should a film console us with its own brilliance when it aims to discomfit us with its content?
80
Village Voice
Nothing illustrates the monstrosity of globalized commerce more vividly than the lateral tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's mesmerizing documentary Manufactured Landscapes.
80
Variety
This landmark glimpse into China's modern-day industrial revolution becomes something more -- a profound, open-ended meditation on man's physical impact on his environment.
80
Variety by Peter Debruge
This landmark glimpse into China's modern-day industrial revolution becomes something more -- a profound, open-ended meditation on man's physical impact on his environment.
80
Village Voice by Jim Ridley
Nothing illustrates the monstrosity of globalized commerce more vividly than the lateral tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's mesmerizing documentary Manufactured Landscapes.
80
Washington Post by Stephen Hunter
Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly. The point: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.
75
New York Post by V.A. Musetto
Burtynsky doesn't preach. He's content to let viewers make up their own minds from his eye-opening and eye-pleasing images.
70
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
Absorbing if unsettling documentary.
70
The Hollywood Reporter
The result is a highly unusual viewing experience that stimulates the senses and the conscience simultaneously.
70
Film Threat by Pete Vonder Haar
Slow in places, but the feeling of foreboding you’ll take away from it is undeniable.
67
The A.V. Club by Noel Murray
What's left off the table is a meaningful examination of environmental artists' responsibility to the environment they depict, and the question of whether all truly great art leaves behind a little toxic waste of its own.
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