Directed by:
David LynchScreenplay:
David LynchCinematography:
Peter DemingComposer:
Angelo BadalamentiCast:
Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Ann Miller, Dan Hedaya, Justin Theroux, Brent Briscoe, Robert Forster, Katharine Towne, Lee Grant, Scott Coffey, Billy Ray Cyrus (more)VOD (2)
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Naomi Watts (Birdman, Funny Games) gives a career-making performance as aspiring actress Betty, who after arriving in Hollywood, befriends an amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) and tries to help her recover her memory. The film establishes these characters but then proceeds to subvert any certainty about them, instead offering a swirling atmosphere of increasing surrealism. (Independent Cinema Office)
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Reviews (14)
A really tough nut to crack, even the squirrel from Ice Age wouldn't be able to handle it. Lynch plays an unequal game with the viewer and it may not be to everyone's taste. I appreciate Lynch's disregard for sales and going about his business, but I guess the distributors of Mullholland Drive weren't jumping for joy at the $7 million US box office. If I were them, I would announce a competition "Whoever understands this film wins a dinner with Lynch in person". It wouldn't cost them anything because no one would come and they would at least get some interesting advertising. Lynch not only gives no answers (and that's a good thing), but he gives no clues to understanding his visions. He only mumbles, but very skillfully. For the first twenty minutes I had a hard time getting into the action on the screen, but gradually Lynch wrapped me around his finger and I devoured one scene after another. I didn't ask for an explanation, I took the whole thing as a sequence of mini-stories that may or may not have a connection. I enjoyed putting the pieces together, I embraced Lynch's game. And why I’m not giving it five stars then? Because Lynch overdid it with the final half hour. Everything has its limits, even Lynch's riddles and plot twists. I can totally see him having royal fun over all the "what was that about" discussions. Once again he took a shot at the audience and got away with it. And by the way, Naomi Watts is amazing here, acting and visually.
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I didn't, and probably never will, fully understand. After the completely direct and purposefully comprehensible Elephant Man, I saw David Lynch's second feature film, which completely breaks boundaries in terms of the level of comprehensibility. The first two-thirds were somewhat interpretable, but the last twenty minutes completely reversed all my thought processes, and it was only at the last word "Silencio!" I said: "Oh shit!". I've never been so confused and conflicted, and in fact this may have been one of the director's intentions. Why explain everything at the end, when the viewer at least has something to think about. All in all, a very weighty film that, along with the premise, excels in the acting and the wonderfully gloomy and mysterious music.
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Brilliantly told...... hypnotic. Once I figure out exactly what the poet was trying to say, I'll pack my bags, drive to LA, and tap a celebratory keg on Mulholland Drive in Lynch's honour, but until then I'll just have a few beers to celebrate a disarming cinematic puzzle that harbours big ideas and never before seen narrative mastery, though it perhaps unnecessarily stretches out the action in the first two acts and delays the final big bang, during which I shuddered even at parts whose inflection is entirely inappropriate for this database, and I was already grasping for potential explanations, only to be outwitted again by Lynch, who has done something that only Jindra Petáková and her high school maths textbook have so far managed to do: weld my brain and condemn me to a grade between 4 and zero. I'll give it a four this time, because I admire the flamboyant command of attention on the level of so many characters, which turns out in the end to be so gripping and mutually motivated, and I'm looking forward to the second viewing, from which I'm already promising myself pure five-star ecstasy over the hypnotic cinematography, the music, the breasts of Watts and Harring, and of course the story, which has something to say, even though it utters it only in unknowns. I'm really eager to figure out how everything works, and with that David has clearly done his bit... 85%
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A psycho(il)logical and strange picture that is hard to grasp... So, in fact, the type of classic that we are used to getting from Lynch. If it had ended twenty minutes earlier, this would have been maybe the most graspable Lynch movie ever, but at that moment is breaks into the most bizarre movie ever. Lynch on his best film-making (not series-making!) form.
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This is either a masterpiece or a bad trip, but an excellent and unusual experience in any case. Also, since my first encounter with Lynch, I have learnt how to watch his films (to accept that most of the action doesn’t take place in the real world), so this time I’m convinced that I know what this one is roughly about, and it actually begins to make sense in the last half hour. Basically, it draws attention to feelings and conditions that are common in a person’s daily life, even if they are not always aware of them: desire, disappointment, pain, escape, revenge. PS: Or it’s something completely different.
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