Critics reviews

Guzmán finds new methods of excavation and new ways in which to combine found materials, the manifest metaphor—the dialogue within and between in his films—ultimately exemplifying that when correlations are causations, in time's current and Guzman's body of work, nothing ever really ends.

Theretofore his most formally ambitious film, Nostalgia is more overtly philosophical than his previous films, and feels like a thematic culmination... Within this biting irony, Guzman meditates on the ideas of memory, history and existence that flow as undercurrents through his entire body of work.

A film in which the author of one of the most visceral of vérité documents reveals a cosmic perspective that's also evident in some of the short films in Icarus's box – and the aspiring sci-fi writer is reunited with the indefatigable chronicler of Chilean history.

High-concept metaphors like these are risky, to say the least, but Nostalgia builds to an epiphanic force on the basis of precise, symmetrical contrasts: networks of dunes and systems of stars; examining planets through a telescope and looking through a magnifying glass at a shoe, a skull or a bone; the discovery of a distant nebula and the discovery of a tooth among millions of grains of sand.

The film becomes a rather Kantian meditation on the starry heavens above and the moral law within, as Guzmán, who tells us he loved science and science fiction as a boy, shows us staggeringly beautiful images both of the cosmos and the everyday natural world – the more remote reaches of the universe are visible thanks to the thin atmosphere over Chile and the location of the observatories.