Inducted into the National Film Registry, Library of Congress, 2007. Part of Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema Repertory.
The canonical essay on the film, placing it alongside Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera as one of the two great works of reflexive cinema.
— Lois Mendelson & Bill Simon, Artforum, 1971
“Jacobs was inviting me to see the 1905 movie — and, by extension, cinema itself — with newly opened eyes.”
— Manohla Dargis, “The Strangely Beautiful Realities You Can Discover in a Ken Jacobs Film,” The New York Times, October 7, 2025
“Tom, Tom is, in fact, a demonstration of the amorous caress of this early object of desire, the cinema, through the use of close-up, slow motion (combined with panning and changes of angle), masking, and freeze-frame.”
— Annette Michelson
On the film’s history and the 1905 Bitzer original, including Ken’s remark “Eight snappy scenes? Not when I got through with it.”
— Screen Slate
On the film’s canonization, written for the Kino Lorber collection release.
— In Review Online, 2021
Jacobs returned to the 1905 film across five decades: A Tom Tom Chaser (2002), Anaglyph Tom (2008), Return to the Scene of the Crime (2008), and the Nervous System performances The Impossible: Chapters One, Three, and Four.