Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.
Laurie Anderson's essay film is a genuinely singular artistic object — meditative, poetic, and deeply personal, blending Super-8 home footage, animation, and original music into an unmistakable voice. Cinematography earns a high mark for its inventive layering of image textures and dreamlike visual grammar. Novelty is equally high because no other film sounds or feels quite like this — it occupies its own aesthetic space between memoir, philosophy, and elegy. The plot (as a loose essay structure) is above average but intentionally non-narrative, which limits its broad accessibility. Acting is less relevant here given the documentary form, with Anderson's narration being the sole 'performance' — resonant but not conventionally actorly. The ending, while quietly moving, doesn't fully cohere into a transcendent conclusion, keeping it at a solid but not exceptional level.