Powerful film packed with profanity and brutality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 25, 2010

Anyone stumbling into the cinema halfway through would think they were watching a documentary, as Manic dispenses with all cinematic flourishes, instead aiming for and achieving absolute realism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2006

It's an undemonstrative, vividly authentic film.

| Feb 9, 2006

Shows more hopelessness than optimism but is never less than honest.

Full Review | May 30, 2003

Its modesty of aspiration and its naturalism of style are its two most salient values.

Full Review | May 30, 2003

A movie of heart and substance.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 23, 2003

Manic has quite a bit to recommend it as well, not the least of which is the lack of Hollywood gloss mental patients.

Full Review | Original Score: B | May 23, 2003

Melamed and his cast provide more than a few truth-divining moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 23, 2003

At the end of Manic I'd seen nothing really new, and the camera style made me work hard to see it at all.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 23, 2003

Yes, there are the usual lessons learned, but the movie also speaks the truth about kids who need to lash out but only end up harming each other and themselves.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 22, 2003

While it neither succeeds nor satisfies as drama, it's a great calling card for the actors involved, principally Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 22, 2003

It's too painful and intimate to let you keep its subjects at a safe distance, as most mental illness films do. That, of course, is the point.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 22, 2003

It's not that the film has much to say about teen mental illness, but that it creates a world of people about whom we suddenly care.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 16, 2003

A riveting troubled teens story that has the unvarnished poignance of first-rank docus (e.g. Streetwise, Decline of Western Civilization III, etc.) on similar thematic turf.

Full Review | May 14, 2003

Absorbing and occasionally disturbing film.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | May 9, 2003

The group-talk and anguished groping feel true, as does David's frustrations with the kids.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 8, 2003

All the performances are poignant, and, while the screenplay reaches no new conclusions, it allows the actors room to create and grow.

| Original Score: B+ | May 8, 2003

I'm guessing the art photography is meant to signify a fragile state; instead, it suggests an attention disorder to which camcorder-wielding filmmakers are dismayingly susceptible.

| Original Score: C+ | May 7, 2003

Searching for a documentary feel, the camera here is so shaky that you cling to the arms of your chair lest you pitch into the next row.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 2, 2003

Shooting on digital video gives the film a spareness and immediacy that works well with its subject. The portrayals are all so natural and deeply felt that there are moments when it feels like we are watching something that is happening right now.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | May 1, 2003