Burtynsky's photos are stunning (some of his images of dumps resemble Jackson Pollack's drip art), but what's most interesting about Landscapes is the tension between his work and the filmmaking.

Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky shoots the recycling dumps, superfactories, vast quarries and shipyards, capturing visual beauty in the ecological devastation.

Baichwal just tries to create a cinematic equivalent of Burtynsky's still images rather than a documentary on the artistic process of Burtynsky himself. So the end result is a film that would be better as a coffee table book.

Feels constrained and rather dutiful, no matter how passionate these people are about what they're observing.

The movie works best traveling from the eye straight to the conscience.

Pulls real, enigmatic beauty out of the artificial.

never stoops to easy scape-goating, nor to pat, politically correct answers. It is as engaging, as maddeningly thought-provoking, as it is beautiful

Again and again, Baichwal tapers passages of her film toward resolution in the form of a finished picture by Burtynsky, telescoping her vision and his.

Opens with [an] extended moment: a 10-minute-long tracking shot of workers, rows and rows and rows of them, putting in their hours at a Chinese factory. It's an epic touch and reason enough to see this movie in a theater with a large screen.