Expectations of reliable recurring patterns are set up and knocked down throughout, which is intellectually scintillating if sometimes tough going viscerally. It took me nearly two-thirds of the running time to finally enter the rhythm; results will vary.

| Jan 25, 2023

The film's so simple in its concept yet so profound. Thoroughly absorbing, but my favorite ride is two old Indian ladies eating ice cream bars, laughing all the way down.

| Feb 22, 2021

Certainly a hard film to sell to your average filmgoer, Manakamana is surprisingly watchable thanks to its languorous pacing that naturally encourages cultural contemplation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2020

Slow cinema doesn't get much slower than this.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 12, 2020

Manakamana is a dare, a challenge to its audience, one that trusts us to fill in the story, bring our perceptions and prejudices to what we see on the screen.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 22, 2019

The concept may be simple, but it delves a lot deeper than most other documentaries.

| Original Score: 7.4/10 | Jun 27, 2019

It's meditative, beautiful, utterly fascinating, and one of the year's finest documentary achievements.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 3, 2019

What we see and enjoy is the king of cinema: the human visage. recommended

| Sep 26, 2018

Manakamana is a record of this circuitry, an index of faces seen in the act of seeing, thrust into the vacancy of a nature that scrolls by like some uncanny rear projection from an old Hollywood film.

| Oct 10, 2017

Hypnotic and serene.

| Mar 28, 2017

It's hard to describe the passions and joys that Manakamana manages to cohere while celebrating its world.

| Original Score: A | Jun 28, 2016

This truly remarkable, beautiful film, the latest from Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab... refrains from feeding us context via traditional documentary tropes such as title cards or voice-over narration.

| Nov 18, 2015

This is an interesting experiment as a movie, but I don't think it is a terribly successful one. It takes a lot of patience to sit through the dull bits, where nothing much happens, to get to the more interesting parts.

| Original Score: C | Jan 19, 2015

A two-hour film with Nepalese as its first language, no introduction, no narration and no dramatic arc sounds like a challenge, in much the same way that unshelled lobster is delicious: both require a little patience.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 15, 2014

If only the viewing environment were more suited to casual contemplation, allowing the audience (like the passengers) to dip in and out of the car in 10-minute stretches.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 14, 2014

A gimmicky observation of life in Nepal, this is one of those documentaries that offers the audience an experience rather than any actual information.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 12, 2014

Manakamana works as a tone poem, a Warholian revel in the mundane and an ethnographic study of an isolated corner.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 12, 2014

Though its subject matter doesn't seem particularly fun on the surface, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's Manakamana is a sort of structural game, by turns contemplative and, yes, playful.

| Dec 11, 2014

Boring? Absolutely not. Strangely revealing, meditative and funny? Yes, as passengers reveal themselves by costume, silence, chatter and posture, rising up through a hazy, green landscape into the clouds where Manakamana.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 11, 2014

We're basically gawking at a commute.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 11, 2014