Alicia I love this movie so much

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

kittysmith-23122 Samsara is beyond pretty visuals though that's the first thing you notice. There is a story and a connection between every image in this movie which is a sequel to the similarly made Baraka in 1992. From Tibetian Buddhist retreats to the sprawling freeways of Los Angeles, from pictures of a tattooed hulking giant cuddling his baby to sex dolls being mass produced Samsara will at once shock and humble you. This documentary is universally admired, and you should definitely give it a shot. If you love photography than this is a must watch.

jaapgrolleman Samsara has no voice-over, but it speaks volumes. It's cleverly constructed, drawing visual queues and combining completely different subjects, which will make your mind make up the compliments and critique it has to make. Samsara starts and never holds back, and it has left me in awe.

Samer Masri Beyond its visual glory, or its inspiring adaptation of the moving portrait, Samsara is a powerful visual poem on humanity. I felt extreme terror as well as wonder while watching this film, and eventually, I had made new realizations about the human condition, something which was clearly was an admirable goal of the directors.Man man seems newly enslaved by a society so rapidly evolving that it efficiently directs the imperfect behaviors of humans towards a collective goal, such that we begin to function as cells do in the human body: as the expendable building blocks of an unsympathetic and greater whole.If slavery and life are intertwined through the struggle against death, where then, is freedom? Idyll? No, that is impossible. Whence man could do something for nothing at all. Endless rows of factory workers performing the same rote task ad nausea represent a failure to achieve this. However, the contrasting images of enormous crowds of Muslims encircling the Kaaba, also minuscule cells in a larger construct, or of the group of monks who work tirelessly on something only to later destroy it, present a solution: freedom is merely the freedom to choose your own form of slavery, rather than be subject to one forced upon you by an external force or by laziness.I believe Ron Fricke was trying to communicate this, but that by ending the film with more of my favorite shot from the film, that of a pristine barren desert, wind echoing the silence of it all, he was also trying to take a step back form the overwhelming beauty and horror of life on this Earth and offer reconciliation: all we are is dust in the wind. One can fall back into the eternal caress of death, where even the suffering of an entire species can seem distant and unimportant.

Christopher Culver In 1993, filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson presented a deeply moving portrait of features universal to all human societies, warned of ecological collapse, and depicted how technology was changing our lives in BARAKA. Shot on 70mm film, this was one of the most visually impressive films ever made, and its lack of any dialogue or narration allowed viewers to engage in their own individual reflections about the panorama on the screen. Two decades later, the team returned with SAMSARA, a sequel that wasn't really necessary.One reason that SAMSARA is not very good is that it often seems a shot-for-shot repeat of BARAKA. The filmmakers revisit many of the same locations (such as Thai prostitutes, a chicken-processing plant, home appliance factories, landfill gleaners). Again Buddhism, the Ka'aba and high church Christianity are depicted, but because the film does not go on to any other religions than what was on BARAKA, these rituals feel this time like cheap exoticism instead of unquenchable anthropological curiosity. SAMSARA also lacks the dramatic arc of BARAKA, coming across as a random succession of images instead of the journey from sacredness to horror and back that we found in its predecessor.That is not to say that SAMSARA is completely without interest. There is an astonishing clip of performance artist Olivier de Sagaza, and the freakish Dubai landscape is depicting in a detail that few (even those who have been there) have seen. SAMSARA is all in all a darker film, and while depictions of the wreckage of Katrina, a Wyoming family that are proud to own an arsenal of guns, and a wounded veteran may fail to really shock viewers in the West who have already been exposed to such images for years, scenes of garish funerals in Nigeria and Indonesian men making the rounds in a sulphur mine (even though they know it is killing them) are stirring and memorable. Of course the visuals are rich, and in Bluray format on my HD projector the film is just as stunningly detailed as its predecessor.However, SAMSARA lacks enough new things to say, it surprisingly doesn't offer continual rewards on rewatching, and just by the fact that it exists out there it potentially dilutes the impact of BARAKA, once a singular film. I was entertained enough to give this a 3-star rating, but I would still recommend BARAKA, and even for those who have seen and loved BARAKA, I would not recommend moving on to this film.