Critics reviews

While the dense, twitchy construction of Common Carrier can make it feel at times rambling and overstuffed, it's precisely this quality which makes it such an effective model for contemporary life.

Whenever someone calls to configure their modem, he's required to launch into a spiel about whether they wouldn't rather just commit to expensive, blazing-fast internet bundled with cable? In both movies and life, crass capitalism of the most clumsily worded and unfeeling type is inescapable; in Common Carrier, it sits side by side in a normative ambience of YouTube DIY videos and lots of radio (Hot 97 and NPR, mostly — plenty of Fetty Wap and Morning Edition make this already a period piece).

Initially jarring, the relentless stream-of-consciousness of the collage-like textures becomes a lyrical entropy, bathed in gold summer light. Bewilderingly cosmic, the film gives unexpected rise to a sticky miasma of apprehension and political disquietude, punctuated by the occasional radio clips referencing the then-upcoming 2016 election

Wilkins has a way of casually laying out all sorts of disparate bits of ephemera as though he's just woolgathering, and then suddenly pulling everything together in a snap – in Common Carrier it happens in a piece of double-barrelled montage set to Young M.A.'s ‘Oh My Gawdd' freestyle that's so virtuosic that I swear to God I fist pumped while alone in my apartment watching the Vimeo link. This doesn't happen too often.