‘Nostalgia’ Review: Jon Hamm and Catherine Keener Star In a Strange Mosaic About the Sweet Pain of Memory

Nobody could argue that Mark Pellington’s “Nostalgia” isn’t clear about the nature of its concern.

From its mournful opening credits to its bittersweet final beat, this strange mosaic — a relatively star-studded melodrama that’s passed from one sad character to another like a baton or a bad cold — is a movie with only one thing on its mind.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a story that’s so willing to spend itself on a single idea, but nostalgia is maybe too elusive a subject for such close examination.It’s a universal sensation — memory’s aftertaste.

But it’s also one of the most intensely personal feelings we have (or pleasantly suffer through), so difficult to retrace in fiction because it requires a character to have something and lose something at the same time; to be seduced by a shadow for the sole reason that

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