"Public Domain, made in response to an ill-conceived and since-rescinded edict involving heavy taxes for filming in New York City, is both a classic on-the-fly, man-in-the-crowd city film, and an implicit hurrah in favor of the unauthorized camera-stylo liberty that has defined the avant-garde. Jennings's edits turn people, buildings, windows and shadows into tectonic ballerinas in a volumetric dance, and the results are electrifying and joyous. This is one film you'll regret being able to see only once."
- Michael Sicinski

"Jim Jennings' Public Domain is done in startling, plastic color, as the filmmaker grabs snatches of imagery from below mid-town in Manhattan. Not having seen any work by the filmmaker before, it was difficult, in the montage flurry, to grasp at what I was supposed to be seeing beyond the rhythm and the color. But soon, falling into the film's incredibly brisk movement, I began to be thrilled by Jennings capturing the barest minimum of gestures and signs. Not a series of gestures, mind you, but seemingly the movements, the meaning, the text grasped at a split second in the dead center of its being, the beginning and end of each 'thing' neatly, economically cut off, leaving at once a suggestion and something pure, centered, and instantaneous: the most whole of things caught for the briefest of moments, both so small and so fast it is nearly impossible to say what they were."
- Daniel Kasman