Critic Reviews

In the end, it's best to make peace with the film's essential and deliberate inscrutability -- something Lynch fans have learned to do since Twin Peaks -- and to simply marvel at Dern's astonishing performance, which few actresses are likely to top anytime soon.

Inland Empire is interchangably terrifying, maddening, shockingly hilarious and perversely exciting, and that's just to those who end up disliking it.

David Lynch's first digital video, almost three hours long, resists synopsizing more than anything else he's done. Some viewers have complained, understandably, that it's incomprehensible, but it's never boring, and the emotions Lynch is expressing are never in doubt.

While I did enjoy the ride I took with the film, after the lights came up I was just thrilled Lynch was allowed to create such a journey for us to go on. Imagine what the cinema world would be like if more great directors threw caution to the wind and followed their artistic vision. It's a world I'd like to see and I hope Lynch continues to pave the way.

A dazzling and exquisitely original riddle as told by an enigma, featuring a superb, multi-layered performance by Laura Dern.

One of the few films I've seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse.

It is Lynch's most experimental endeavor in the 30 years since "Eraserhead," that it will do nothing to draw new fans to the director's work and that, after two viewings, I cannot wait to see it again.

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

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

Only David Lynch could make the incomprehensible so compelling.