Inland Empire: Critic Reviews

Inland Empire is so locked up in David Lynch's brain that it never burrows its way into ours.

David Lynch's extraordinary, savagely uncompromised new film is as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse.

The great eroto-surrealist David Lynch has gone truffling for another imaginary orifice of pleasure, with results that are fascinating, sometimes very unwholesome, and always enjoyable.

It's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood.

The way to watch it is to skip uneasily along its surface and steel yourself for those moments when Lynch pulls you into the vortex. More than any working filmmaker, he knows the dreamlike power of undertow.

It's an experience. Either you give yourself over to it or you don't. And if you do, don't miss the end credits.

Lynch serves up enough irrationally disturbing images for 100 classic Asian horror films, and the bedraggled Dern is so overflowingly open that you can't dismiss the movie as an arty exercise.

While you suspect Lynch's digital video acumen will flower into something extraordinary in coming projects, this one's intermittently extraordinary at best.

Inland Empire is full of good and bad girls, but [Lynch] gives this obsession an interesting spin by having most of them played by the same actress.

Lynch's brilliant and bizarre films have often come to us as a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, but his latest is enshrouded with two layers of 'who cares?'

A can't-miss experience and likely one of the year's very best films.

Inland Empire may mesmerize those for whom the helmer can do no wrong, but the unconvinced and the occasional admirer will find it dull as dishwater and equally murky.

What is Inland Empire -- which Lynch is understandably distributing himself -- about? What is it trying to say? If you figure that out, let me know.

An amazing and unshakeable experience.

A bucket of Lynchian leftovers, stirred slightly and left to ferment in the dark.

Despite its moments of inspired terror and mystery, this isn't a cult hit in the making like Mulholland Drive, or a contrarian critic's delight like Lost Highway. It's an opaque and baffling work, difficult to follow and difficult to like.

The effect, after an hour or two, begins to resemble a very anxiety-fraught session of watching music videos on MTV.

An interminable bore.

Inland Empire might be David Lynch's masterpiece -- or it might just be a total mess. Either way it's vintage Lynch and designed exclusively, it seems, for hardcore fans -- or perhaps solely for the director himself.

My advice, in the face of such hallucinatory brilliance, is that you hang on.

...The film, which begins promisingly, disappears down so many rabbit holes (one of them involving actual rabbits) that eventually it just disappears for good.

Trippy, twisty thriller is totally out to Lynch.

Unspeakably beautiful

The three-hour movie is at once inscrutable and deeply satisfying for its daring high wire act of narrative illusion and passionately charged emotions.