Critic Reviews

Everyone's reeling from dreads and reveries they can't quite comprehend, and Zulawski's daft incidents, comic sketches, and stabs of profundity will likely put you into a similar awed stupor.

Reality has never been this fun, even if it's frequently this random and hopeless. Better to take the oblong fantasy.

Made 15 years after Żuławski’s last film, Cosmos makes for a fittingly offbeat and mystifying statement of purpose for a filmmaker fascinated by confrontations with the cosmic unknown.

A filmmaker who values the power of shock, but not necessarily thrills for thrills’ sake, Żuławski elucidates material with tools that announce themselves in their presentation — surprising camera dollies, fast pans, sudden cuts, overly prominent music cues — and raise complex questions about their relation to one another.

With all farces, timing and rhythms are absolutely crucial and Zulawski — working with editor Julia Gregory — maintains a disarming brio from the very first seconds.

If self-aware, ultra-arch arthousery isn’t your bag, give it a miss. If you’re looking for a good, weird, often very funny time, don’t miss it.

It’s often hilarious, confounding and downright strange; if not the director’s most polished work, it nevertheless delivers a demented philosophical puzzle that’s fun to scrutinize in all of its baffling uncertainties.

The result is nonstop, epistemological slapstick.

There is a real sense of poignancy and heartache in random scenes with Azema or Balmer and even if the film deliberately eschews easy comprehension it remains involving and intriguing enough to keep the viewer on board.

Zulawski maintains such expert control of the film’s look and tone that there can be no question that each choice has been deliberate, whatever the significance.