Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Overrated and overhyped

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Man Push Cart" is an extraordinary film by two Half-Americans- One born in that other Iran (Winston-Salem) is the Director Ramin Bahrani (his feature film debut) and the other, is the Film's Producer and the Lead Actor, Ahmed Rizvi who was born in Pakistan. The joint-venture embodies the very soul of Italian Neo-realism, free of contrived melodrama and phoney suspense, it ennobles the hard work by which its hero earns his daily bread. He owns a stainless steel bagel wagon, which he pushes through the lonely Pre-dawn streets. He sells bagels and sweet rolls and juice and coffee and many customers call him by his first name although they would never think to ask his last one.A modern-day Sisyphus, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) finds himself condemned by tragedy to spend his days and nights alone pulling his coffee and Donut cart through New York City's bustling streets, his load a symbol of his inescapable sorrow. Writer-director Ramin Bahrani's film debut follows its forlorn protagonist—a former Rock Star known in his native Pakistan as "the Bono of Lahore"—through his gruelling dawn- to-dusk routine of lugging his stand and propane tank to and from his proscribed city corner, stacking muffins and prepping paper cups with teabags, trying to sell bootleg porn DVDs in his free time, and occasionally venturing out to nightclubs with his Westernized Pakistani friends.Like that daily grind, his story of salvation sought and never attained is one of listless, bloodless tedium. Bahrani's portrait of existential urban malaise posits a world in which Ahmad's interpersonal interactions lead merely to further humiliation and misery, whether it be his Sociology or economically tense dealings with a Pakistani businessman (Charles Daniel Sandoval), his communication with the accusatory mother-in-law who won't let him see his son, or his awkward relationship with Spanish newsstand vendor Noemi (Leticia Dolera) to whom he's incapable of expressing his tentative romantic feelings. Its fatalism heightened by its moody depiction of midtown Manhattan as a place of cheerless nocturnal shadows and condescending daylight faces, the film occasionally alleviates its pessimism with brief moments of tenderness, such as Ahmad's care for the tiny kitten that serves as a surrogate for his real offspring.Downside: Shot in tight, intimate close-ups, the attending visuals often mirror the oppressive constructiveness of both Ahmad's cart confines and his weighty grief. Yet Man Push Cart's physical cinematographic proximity never elicits the empathy it intends, as its cold, omniscient perspective increasingly becomes akin to that of a scientist clinically watching a rat futilely search for a bite of cheese at the end of a maze. And finally, the filmmaker's laboured attempts to avoid trafficking in hope have the deleterious effect of casting nearly every scene as a disingenuous, pedantic example of the cosmos's callous cruelty.

With "Man Push Cart", Ramin Bahrani crafts a truly unusual and haunting tale. This is the story of a former Pakistani musician who now lives in New York and works a push cart. His life is mundane,and relies basically around his job. When he meets a fellow Pakistani, who recognizes him, he begins to open up to him. He also starts a strange, quiet relationship with a woman who also mans a push cart. But, slowly, his life begin to fall apart.This film is not for everyone, but, for those who like offbeat, strange, and quiet films, "Man Push Cart" offers an unusual look at human life, and loneliness, as well as living in the past, and establishes Bahrani as one of the more underrated directors working today.

To me, this film represents a new variety of the bad movies. So the 3 stars I give it are mostly for inventing a new genre. There are many bad movies out there but not similar to this one.From the very beginning, I could not understand if I was watching a documentary or a movie. For a documentary, it was lacking a voice-over. Plus, the supporting characters' behavior/motivation looked a bit too scripted/contrived. For a real movie, it lacked the plot and the dialog. For a real movie that is just so out there that it does not need either a plot or a dialog, it lacked that spark of life and originality that captures your imagination and keeps you glued to the screen until the end (and then you want more).We meet a Pakistani immigrant who used to be a popular singer in Lahore and who is now reduced to doing menial work in NYC in the name of, I suppose, the great American Dream. I say "I suppose" because we never find out exactly how he got here and what he wants in life (besides seeing his son). The House of Sand and Fog, Before Night Falls, Mississippi Masala, heck, even The Kite Runner did it before and did it better (and that list is not exhaustive).There are some good technical things about the movie. The monotony of his existence is represented very well by showing how he gets the cart ready every morning by lining up cups, taking out bagels, etc. Exactly the same sequence is shown twice - at the beginning of the movie (in his own cart) and at the end (in the friend's cart). But what happened in between does not qualify as full feature film. A technically excellent film school project, but very weak if reviewed otherwise.

**SPOILERS ALERT**Man Push Cart is a heavy, slice-of-life look at a Pakastani immigrant's daily routine selling coffee, donuts and bagels from a cart in Manhattan. His wife died a year earlier, his in-laws have his son, and Ahmed has yet to rejoin life as he continues to mourn. Ahmed meets a series of people as well as a kitten who can pull him out of his dreary existence, but each of these are slowly pulled away from him as Ahmed chooses to remain in or cannot let go of the life he has carved out for himself in the last year. I can be satisfied with an unhappy ending if there is resolution in the film, but this one does not have it. If the back story of Ahmed's wife and why he had to leave Pakastan were explained, this movie would have been phenomenal. Unfortunately, this does not happen, and I was left feeling unsettled with numerous questions and just worn down by the painful existence of Ahmed without understanding why he lives the life he leads.