This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Blistering performances.

This is officially the worst thing I have ever seen on the screen. I mean including anything you can see on any screen, from those error messages, windows blue screen to cheap action movies, bad advertisements, and even those annoying physically damaged cellphone screens, this "Inland Empire" is the worst.There is nothing, a whole 3 hours of nothing. The more some Lynch fanboys try to extract something from it, the more ridiculous it gets. And don't get me wrong, I gave 8 stars to some of his other works so this has Nothing to do with a name. The fact is, the movie is a piece of garbage that is an insult to everyone who watches it.Don't waste your time.

I've had dreams like this. Everything's confused and mushed together, you find yourself trying to fix something using a method that will make no sense upon waking. Not a nightmare so much as an annoyance, an endless period of unpleasantness.That's the experience of Inland Empire.The first time I watched this movie I gave up about half an hour in. It wasn't just that it was random and incoherent, but also that it was painfully slow. Every scene dragged. Rehearsals for the movie Laura Dern was working on revealed a really boring movie, and we saw a lot of it.But a few months later, after watching Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: The Return, I thought maybe I should try again. Maybe, as with Mulholland, it will all click together.There is debate on whether one should even try to make sense of Inland Empire. Some argue you should just *experience* it. So the first thing to mention is I did not enjoy the experience. The movie is just so slow, with so little happening. There are good elements; Dern is excellent, especially when telling grim stories to an unnamed man, and there's an oppressive sense of dread that I like, but overall I was just bored. Mulholland Drive made sense to me by the end, but even if it hadn't, I could still say I enjoyed the experience of watching it. I can't say that of Inland Empire.After I watched the film I read some analysis. Some people began by saying, "this movie isn't that hard to understand once you get the key," but these people have radically different analyses. So no, this is not easy to understand, although there do seem to be some points of agreement. But I think the reality is, as one writer suggested, that Lynch was just messing around with his friends and his digital camera and at a certain point had so much material that he thought he might as well turn it into a movie. Lynch himself said he didn't know where the movie was going. So while yes, you can create a narrative out of it if you play with the chronology and the characters, it's probably nothing to do with Lynch.This is the Lynch of Eraserhead; the artsy guy who isn't afraid to bore or annoy his audience. Some people love that. Some people hate a movie that is comprehensible, wanting something loose that allows for interpretation. This movie is for those people. If you're not one of those people, I would suggest skipping this.And if you want to see a really great movie that blurs the line between movies and reality, seek out the anime Millennium Actress.

A David Lynch film is a tightrope act of sorts. They're all a little abstract, a little bit mystical, but remaining (usually) is a looming mystery that is never solved; the viewer must be ready to interpret the abstruse puzzle presented to them. In a great Lynch film, Mulholland Dr. for example, a profound characterization can act as a backbone to the many head spinning detours that dawdle in the celluloid. Without one, though, a Lynch film can become intolerable, masturbatory rather than dazzling, a series of puzzle pieces that don't fit anywhere besides his own mind. He is perhaps the definitive hit-or-miss filmmaker — when he hits, his baffling ideas are seductive, lingering in our memory like our very first run-in with Rita Hayworth's Gilda; but when he misses, we're presented with a nightmarish landscape that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, doesn't go anywhere, and doesn't have much in the way of meaning. (And a Lynch film is generally long, making insufferability even more insufferable as the images go on and on and on and on …)Simply put, Inland Empire is one of David Lynch's most unbearable movies. It's his first film shot completely digitally, done so with a Sony DCR- VX1000 camcorder; the images, in return, are fuzzy and textural. Some, especially Lynch, find this photographic technique to hold more value in terms of enigma and subversion, but I, possibly in the minority, think that this experiment is a downfall. His images are so outrightly peculiar (only he could sell the idea of three people in rabbit suits living in an apartment together in sitcom bliss) that the cheapness of the digital camera makes his once lush pictorial instincts read like an experimental student short. Before, the lavishness of film made diversions into the freakish more of a surprise; here, Lynchian punches no longer hold the shock the once did. This shouldn't suggest that his cinematic mastery is waning — it's the fault of the camera, not his.Supposedly, Inland Empire is about Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), a has-been actress who has just received a part in a movie that could revitalize her once strong career. Her co-star is known womanizer Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), her director the respected Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). Minutes into the rehearsal process is it revealed that the project is thought to be cursed — it was supposed to be made decades ago, but the actors tragically died during the filmmaking process. Following this revelation, strange things start to occur: Nikki and Devon begin to mimic the lives of the characters they're playing, Sue Blue and Billy Side, and Nikki, desperate as she is to succeed, begins experiencing situations that can only be described as hallucinatory.I say "supposedly" when providing the plot summary because Inland Empire revolves around this storyline for only the first act, possibly even less. It starts off intriguingly, with the same sort of luminous ambiguities of Lost Highway, until it descends into a labyrinth of entangled phantasms. For a while, the delusions are evocative (the audacious pairings with experimental music are especially fascinating), but at three hours, Inland Empire eventually keels over and turns into an unappetizing smörgåsbord of Lynchian rejects. As the story was never interesting enough to begin with, interpretation is left untouched; we're either frustrated or stimulated, mostly the former.The one thing to celebrate in Inland Empire is Laura Dern, in a fearless performance. Her character(s) is hardly defined, but Dern gives us a reason to gaze upon her face with utter enthrallment. She wanders around the maze Lynch places her in the middle of; Dern is so breathtaking that, once in a while, she deceives us into thinking that the material is solid rather than flimsy. More or less, Inland Empire is flimsy. Lynch wrote the script as filming went on (seriously), and nothing ever commences from it. He is a great director, but nothing is worse than taking an audience for granted, especially when that audience has to meander through a film for 180 minutes. Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com

So you have the director, played by Justin Theroux, who is obviously supposed to be Cameron Crowe, and you have the actress, longtime Lynch companion Naomi Watts, who is obviously supposed to represent Cameron Crowe's ex-wife, Nancy Wilson. Cameron Crowe writes a film for her, to win her over, and casts her in the lead role. Pretty straight forward where this leads off to, some interesting twists, paranoia, a couple of Jungian dream sequences, maybe a dance interlude, I can't remember. Then at the same time, a victim of the sex-trade industry in Poland is kept captive in a motel room for the night, and the film playing on the television is the same film that is being filmed by Naomi Watts. Through Lynchian logic, the Polish girl summons Naomi through her image on the television into the room, and the two of them attempt to solve a murder mystery that has a peculiar similarity to another case going on back home in LA. It's all very easy to follow, though byzantine, Lynch has struck gold with his ability to tell a cohesive story and still be sadistically erotic. A good Hollywood meta-thriller, with great production values all the way across the board, from Lynch, who is filming on a hand-held camera, to Lara Flynn Boyle, who some might say reprises a "version" of her role from "Twin Peaks", even down to Terry Crews from "Everybody Hates Chris", making his dramatic role debut as a clever conman on the streets of paradise in the film within the film. Look no elsewhere for a solid block of fun, a little long in the expositional dialogue, but it's so snappily edited and framed you'll look back and go, huh? How could I not have seen that coming? Sort of thing. 10/10 A+ murder mystery