CRITICS REVIEWS
MULHOLLAND DRIVE
DAVID LYNCH
United States, 2001
Lynch's Hollywood is a grand old girl, but she's one with some very treacherous curves. To trace the contours of her sensuality, you need a camera as sensitive as a set of fingertips. Lynch's is.
STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
Like "Memento," Mulholland Drive is an amnesiac noir in the tradition that goes back to "Spellbound" and "Somewhere in the Night."
MICHAEL WILMINGTON
Mulholland Drive isn't a "puzzle" like "Memento," in which the pieces (sort of) fit together. There are some pieces here that will never fit -- except maybe in Lynch's unconscious. And yet -- and yet -- this distinctly Hollywood nightmare makes a deeper kind of sense.
DAVID ELDESTEIN
For film buffs and Lynch fans, this is a glorious high.
JAMI BERNARD
This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else. Mulholland Drive works directly on the emotions, like music.
ROGER EBERT
Not just everything you want in a David Lynch movie, but damn near everything else you want in ANY movie.
MANOHLA DARGIS
It's surreal, erotic, creepy, frustrating, absorbing, transporting and torturous in the way only a Lynch film can be.
SHAWN LEVY
The movie, at two and a half hours, retains much of the unhurried suspense -- the careful cultivating of our patience, of our narrative loyalty -- that is bred by the best TV.
ANTHONY LANE
A dizzying - sometimes frustrating - marvel of moviemaking instinct and ingenuity.
MICHAEL SRAGOW
It just requires an open mind, a love of film and a willingness to dream.
RENE RODRIGUEZ
Watts and Harring even turn out to be the hottest Hollywood couple of 2001. The plot slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost completely inexplicable, though no less thrilling, in the closing stretches--but that's what Lynch is famous for. It looks great too.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
TRapt and beautiful and absorbing.
OWEN GLEIBERMAN
An intriguingly mysterious, self-reflexive ode to the dream factory, it's one of Lynch's most satisfying films.
KEN FOX
It will frustrate viewers who like stories to make instant sense, but fans of provocative puzzles will have mind-teasing fun.
DAVID STERRIT
October 12, 2001
October 12, 2001
Exhilarating not only for its dreamlike images and fierce, frequently reckless imagination but also for the fact that it got made (and released) at all.
EDWARD GUTHMANN
October 12, 2001
October 12, 2001
It's flawed, but it's also rich. And how many films make you feel that you and the filmmaker are following the course of a dream?
JAY CARR
A genuinely ominous and suspenseful thriller.
TODD MCCARTHY
By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with Mulholland Drive.
STEPHEN HOLDEN
October 06, 2001
October 06, 2001
No classic like "The Big Sleep," another famously impossible-to-follow Los Angeles thriller. But for those willing to hang on for dear life, Lynch makes it worth their while.
LOU LUMENICK
Likely as not, these things mean nothing in a conventional plot sense, but as powerful images, as pictures from a dreamlike world, they are unforgettable. And that, David Lynch would probably say, is exactly the point.
KENNETH TURAN
The challenge is exhilarating. You can discover a lot about yourself by getting lost in Mulholland Drive. It grips you like a dream that won't let go.
PETER TRAVERS
It's a lush, lovely dreamscape of a movie, steeped in familiar vernacular (film noir), yet capable of shooting off in totally unfamiliar, surreal directions.
STEVEN REA
Viewers will feel as though they've just finished a great meal but aren't sure what they've been served. Behind them, the chef smiles wickedly.
RICHARD CORLISS
Mulholland Drive is an extended mood opera, if you want to put an arty label on incoherence.
DESSON THOMSON