SAMSARA (PG-13) If you've seen the movies of Ron Fricke (Chronos and Baraka), you know the drill. Fricke, who also serves as cinematographer, worked with director Godfrey Reggio on the 1982 groundbreaking Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance and its subsequent sequels before going off to direct his own work. All of the movies observe humanity and our relationship with our environments, but they are not documentaries. There is no narrative, but there is a dramatic flow, and Fricke elaborates on clear themes with his carefully modulated tracking shots and slow pans, use of atmospheric music and editing schemes that frequently juxtapose the mundane and the mystic.

Many of the sequences in Samsara could easily be stuck in your average National Geographic documentary. Fricke's camera captures fetid jungles, epic mountain vistas, timeless desert landscapes and various cities with the clarity of a master visualist. There's something more at work here, however, which separates a production like Samsara from a generic travelogue: the visual representation of the numinous and our relationship with it. At least, that's the lofty goal Fricke is aiming for. How successfully he conveys that entirely depends on your own spiritual beliefs or lack thereof.

Samsara, a Sanskrit word meaning "the ever turning wheel of life," immediately attempts to lull us into a cinematic trance. Fricke's camera pans over ancient temples in Myanmar, past the façade of Petra and into the violent mouth of an active volcano. These scenes are extraordinary to look at, but a feeling of déjà vu kicks in. It feels banal. Where Samsara resonates, though, is when Fricke's camera moves away from the willfully portentous and focuses on the human face or a cityscape of buzzing motion and restless energy. This is where the recognizable takes on an element of the otherworldly: sex dolls are manufactured in a Japanese factory; the evidence of Katrina's wrath is clearly seen on a child's bedroom; a tattooed gang member tenderly holds his child; prisoners in the Philippines dance in coordinated rhythms as a form of rehabilitation and exercise; an American family proudly displays their arsenal of weapons; and children are baptized, their reactions ranging from sublime joy to fear and confusion. Those images and many others may not register on the same symbolic level as watching Buddhist monks construct a sand mandala, but they remind us how strange and beautiful the mundane can be if we stare long enough.