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88As forceful as its title suggests, and sometimes unbelievably ballsy.
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83There's no denying its grip: It is lurid, fascinating, sickening, and eye-opening.
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80Gorgeous and terrifying.
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80Kohn's gripping Manda Bala is the opposite of a high-school science doc. It's a free-form portrait of a place--Brazil--with scary running motifs: kidnapping, mutilation, plastic surgery, bulletproofing, and frog farming.
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80There's no denying the sharpness of his (Jason Kohn) insights into a society that hasn't so much collapsed as reconstituted itself around venality, profiteering and rage.
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With an excess of excitable style, samba music, and heady, montage-driven metaphor that threatens to bury his film's key ideas, young-gun director Kohn--a New Yorker with South American roots--has clearly set out to make a splash. So far, he's succeeded.
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80Edgy and provocative but with a weakness for sensationalistic footage.
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80Crammed into a lively 85-minute package delivered with loads of dark humor and cinematic flair, this is a worthy winner of Sundance's Grand Jury prize for documentary.
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75Although it is never explicitly stated, Manda Bala essentially argues that when the middle class disappears, the rich and the poor end up feeding on each other, like the frogs that go cannibalistic at the frog farm that gives the movie its central metaphor.
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75The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."
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70What the film does best is document the lengths to which people are going to protect themselves -- subcutaneous microchips for identification, ever-heavier armor for fancy cars.
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70The subject is huge and worthy, and the film makes a noble effort to embrace some of its complexity.
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By the end, despite the film's beautiful cinematography, persuasive subjects and ironically upbeat soundtrack, we just feel bludgeoned.
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60Instead of seriously investigating corruption, money laundering and the buying of politicians, Manda Bala would rather spend its time showing slimy brown frogs slithering over one another as they are dumped from one container into another.
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50Scenes of harvested frogs provide an apt metaphor for Brazil's miserable have-nots, so apt that Kohn can't resist beating it to death.
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42Manda Bala is exciting and stylish, and Kohn knows exactly what he wants the movie to say. But he makes most of his points in the first 10 minutes, with disgusting slow-motion frog footage and sound bites from social scientists pointing out how "corruption is what links all other crimes." The rest is just so much show.
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ChadS.8
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PaulK.9
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MarlusF.10