Zeros and Ones isn’t much of an entertaining sit — watching it feels like dusting off a cryptic artifact from a bygone civilization, its pleasures more archaeological than anything else — but every frame of this weird soup is suffused with the restless creative spirit of someone who’s been waiting for a new world order, and recognizes that we only get so many chances to make it happen.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The Film Stage by Ethan Vestby
At barely feature-length it’s somewhat a wisp of a film, but to good ends, as if the crazed artist at its helm isn’t even totally stopping to think, and like one of his greatest works, New Rose Hotel, channeling the fury of his early art into a different form of aggression.
What Zeros and Ones does do — deliberately, calculatedly, in the kind of messy intuitive manner that’s been the director’s signature of late — is reproduce the general state of unease and insecurity that’s plagued most of us during lockdown.
The intellectual take on the pandemic here is oblique. Still, the mood feels extraordinarily direct, like speaking on a telephone to a version of yourself from maybe half a year ago in lockdown number two or three, before there were vaccines and hope, when the winter nights were long and dawn seemed very far away.
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
The scrambled narrative, listless pace, clumsy stabs at profundity and severe lack of humor will limit the film’s appeal to existing converts and cult movie connoisseurs.