NYFF. Inland Empire.

Rob Nelson in the City Pages on Inland Empire: "Shot in the chintziest-looking digital video, starring Velvet's Laura Dern and a half-dozen other familiar figures from the director's oeuvre, the new film is at once Lynchian and not Lynchian at all, which maybe helps explain why this borderline inexplicable movie about Hollywood and psychosis seems to have split the critical establishment right down the middle. Me, I've seen this three-hour movie twice and I still can't resolve my conflicted feelings about it - which may well be the director's desired effect."

In Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin emphasizes that "it's an experiment - and I don't mean of the Lars von Trier variety, where the end result is strongly predetermined - having more to do with improvisation, texture, and a complete overthrow of cinematic law. Thus, while Lynch's recurrent motifs and themes are recognizable in Inland Empire, they're fragmented, dispersed, and frenetically jumbled in such ways that allow them to take on new shapes and meanings, quite different than just about anything we've seen from Lynch, or anyone, before. Let's put it this way: all those exclamations about the narrative and temporal puzzles of Mulholland Drive now seem just a little laughable in the face of Inland Empire's complete decimation of convention."

"[B]ecause of its entrenched irresolvability, Inland Empire, like Claire Denis's L'Intrus (albeit not as thematically distilled and compact), is the kind of film that becomes more intimate and intuitively - albeit abstractly - coherent with (temporal) distance and osmotic assimilation," writes acquarello.

Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "It bears mentioning (though it usually isn't): from the Elephant Man's mother being crushed by Victorian industry, to naked, damaged Isabella Rossellini wailing 'I love you, love me!' to the Typical American Boy who indulged his dark side with her for a while before abandoning her for blonder pastures in Blue Velvet, to Bobby Peru trapping Dern in his hotel room and demanding that she beg for it in Wild at Heart, Lynch is a director preoccupied by the victimization of women. It's not exactly feminism - it's maybe closer to an admission of guilt over his complicity in the almost implicitly misogynist enterprise of moviemaking."

Tom Hall: "I think that a clear story emerges, one that is structured not unlike Mulholland Drive's dream world." More from Alison Willmore, who sees it as "the David Lynch remix project."

Howard Feinstein, opening the pages of his notebook for indieWIRE, finds it "the hermetic, nearly incomprehensible product of a man who has been in Hollywood too long... On the plus side, the last half hour is superb." Notes on a slew of other films follow. Meanwhile, iW's Eugene Hernandez reports on the reception of Inland Empire (and points to iW video of the press conference) and The Host.

And, as you've probably heard by now, David Lynch will be self-distributing Inland Empire. Paul Harrill comments.

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2006 9:30 AM