[1][2] Zenith premiered at The IFC Center in New York City on October 1, 2010, and had an extended run in January 2011 at the Kraine Theatre with its distribution company, Cinema Purgatorio.
Jack locates Ed's last tape, and is suddenly faced with the same choice his father had to make forty years ago: to surrender his soul, or to remain true to himself, no matter the consequences.
"[11] Joe Leydon praised the film in Variety: "Smoothly incorporating influences as diverse as Philip K. Dick and Terry Gilliam, Zenith commands attention and builds suspense by taking inventive detours through familiar territory.
"[13] Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times commented, this "bewildering collision of noir narration and purple paranoia may be long on atmosphere but is woefully short on sense.
Club gave the 90-minute film a C+, while calling it "an audacious, impressive feat of imagination, turning a few sets and characters into a generation-spanning look at a society where benevolence and malevolence are so finely interwoven that it’s hard to know what to fight against."
Still, the use of dilapidated Brooklyn and Queens locations, creatively photographed by Vladimir Subotic, goes a ways toward selling a future not too far removed from ones en-visioned by Philip K. Dick or J.G.
"[17] Loren Smith of the Boston Globe noted "With its bleak fatalism, “Zenith’’ at times echoes futuristic thrillers such as “12 Monkeys’’ and “Children of Men.’’ The shoestring budget is often obvious, with one too many strobe-light sequences, and it is dispiriting that even a movie set in 2044 has a gold-hearted hooker as the hero’s object of desire.
Director Nikolic shouldn’t remain “anonymous’’ for long: He gets solid performances from all the actors and creates an atmosphere of mounting paranoia that’s grim and chilling.