Metacritic reviews

Machines proves both uncompromising and unforgettable.

This simultaneously beautiful and abjectly unhappy film is forced to close by silently admitting its limitations.

Some accuse the filmmaker of being just like the politicians who turn up, look around and do nothing. It adds a confrontational edge to the film’s already startling combination of immersive aesthetics and humane empathy.

While their situation feels futile, the film is almost poetic in posing important questions.

A sombre, relevant piece of work.

Showing levels of controlled concentration and unfussy flair far beyond what may be expected from a "student film," Machines powerfully evokes the sights and sounds — and almost even the smells — of a sprawling, stygian textiles plant south of India's eighth-largest (but very seldom filmed) city, Surat.

Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.

A spare and unflinching documentary about the true cost of cheap textiles, Machines doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the inhumane work conditions in countries like India, but it forces us to become palpably familiar with the awful facts of the matter.

The ideological charge leveled for decades at this strain of filmmaking is that such eye-catching tableaus romanticize poverty, but prettified squalor has become sadly familiar in global documentary filmmaking. In Machines, even at barely more than an hour, the style leads to diminishing returns.

A film so obedient to current academic fashions in both politics and cinema aesthetics that it ends up feeling both contrived and a bit dishonest.