Rating: 
Summary: Lynch's Tremendous Achievment
Review: This film is the culmination and perfection of all elements from Lynch's past major films with added strengths, thanks largely in part to its ideas being realized and matured. I highly recommend this film to anyone and everyone. Of the reviews and in describing the film (seeing as how people see it necessary) so far, I agree with Mr. John F. Cantrell's. He has approached it thoughtfully and respectfully.Go see this film! Support good film!
Rating: 
Summary: A Mad Drive down Mulholland Drive
Review: One has come to expect the unusual and quirky from David Lynch, as well as an immersion into the fine line between reality and fantasy, ordinary life and madness. While not as tightly and well articulated as Lynch's masterpiece "Blue Velvet", "Mulholland" is a worthy part of Lynch's oeuvre and deserves to be seen. It is more than any other of his films his sidewise glance at the vagaries of Hollywood, with its Mafia-like producers, its hustlers, henchmen, and hopefuls. It is like a collage crafted of kitsch items, pasted together into an affecting but improbable narrative, in which accidents interfere with attempted asassinations, personalities switch between personae, and characters experience the lows and highs of fictional degradation or glory. From stark bright-eyed innocence to suicidal degradation, female characters switch their destinies, connected briefly through lesbian liasons and then emotional estrangement. Male characters are assaulted by other brawnier males, who themselves are finally demolished by ironclad thugs. There are no winners in "Mulholland Drive" and no characters are either black or white, though the mood swerves from candy-colored light to the gloom of purgatory. Some characters may be caricatures, like the immobilized movie mogul in his barren throne room, and the fifties do-wop singers, girl singers in pastels and swoony vocals, while others like the young ingenue deepen into startingly deep characterizations. Lynch does not condemn as much as encapsulate the bittersweet but saccharine flavor of a concocted environment, a Hollywood of the mind like a Coney Island in which spectators and freaks are interchangable, and the roller coaster ride through the Hollywood Hills and the ominous boulevards poses more questions than answers can provide.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh, David, You're So Naughty.
Review: David Lynch has made a living in voyeuristic film making. Colors are so bright. Make-up is so perfect. Wardrobe is maticulous. Acting is so campy. But, sometimes I get tired of Lynch trying to go for an effect and wish he would just tell a story. I walked out of the theatre on this one, because I didn't really care about what happened to the characters. I hate when that happens, especially when movies tack on a dream ending that tells you to void what you felt in the first two reels (Jacob's Ladder, etc.). My favorite Lynch film was Blue Velvet. It was lurid and melodramatic, etc., but it at least told a story. Lynch probably gets a kick out of being a "naughty boy" or the "king of kink." But I hope there are more important things he has to say in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, sad and awfully tragic
Review: Now comes "Mulholland Drive," and while it follows the same story arc of "Lost Highway" in many respects (the flip-flop between reality and an alternative reality, the doppelganger shift of characters, the “mystery men” who seem to control the machinations of change and stability in the Lynch-universe), but seems less abusive in terms of audience suture with what’s occurring on the screen. Quite frankly, where “Lost Highway” left me cold and irked, “Mulholland Drive” left me catatonic as I left the theater… all of Los Angeles seemed strange and off-kilter, and the film left me incredibly sad as well… melancholy and unnerved. And I rather liked that feeling. Why the difference in the two films to me? “Mulholland Drive” seemed like an L.A. story, unlike “Lost Highway” which felt like a road to nowhere (probably its point). “MD” had characters with obvious qualities and motivations, whereas “LH” had zombies who apparently never felt anything but a feeling of dread (Fred, in particular). “MD” had a love story. “LH” had a sex story. Where “LH” felt vapid and uncontrolled, “MH” feels emotive and assured in its handling of the basic story. Quibbles, quibbles, quibbles, just my feelings on the two films… and I’m a huge Lynch fan, experiencing his films chronologically for most of my life (save for his short films, which I’ve just seen recently). “Mulholland Drive” had an air of inevitability about it, and a tragic one at that. You just knew these two women were bound as if they were stuck with Crazy Glue, and destined to be torn apart from each other. Like “LH” it has its obtuse moments, but the overwhelming love story between Betty and “Rita” is the crux of the matter here, and it works! The “Club Silencio” scene is one of the absolute saddest scenes in any movie I’ve ever seen (at least one where it was not obvious the director was pulling at the audience’s heartstrings… it’s almost as if Lynch just birthed the scene, put it out there for all to experience, and let it virally infect the viewer on its own). Amazing! I watch “Lost Highway” from time to time (as well as Lynch’s other extraordinary films, though the closest antecedent to “Mulholland Drive” is, in my humble opinion, “Lost Highway”) and it still leaves me cold like the zombified characters who go through its Lynchian moments. When “Mulholland Drive” arrives on DVD, I’ll have to prepare an evening to see it and then time to weep and deal with the emotions it plants in my psyche. It deserves the praise it’s getting and certainly ranks with “Eraserhead,” “The Elephant Man” and “Blue Velvet” as an extraordinary piece of his cinematic canon.
Rating:
Summary: Lynch's Best
Review: What a great movie for the non-linear cinema fan. I disagree with some of the other reviewers here: this movie is explicable and eminently approachable. The two "halves" are not as precisely divided as some have said... think instead of two layers or environments, reality and dream (or hallucination), that intertwine, occasionally touching, occasionally diverging, to finally merge in colloidal uneasiness near the end. There may debate as to which scenes belong to which layers, too. That said, there are at least three currents to follow if you include the ever-present fabulous matter (represented in this movie by the blue key and other artifacts) that soaks Lynch's work and, in this example, somehow completely ties things together for me. You must pay attention from the beginning. Consider narrative sequence only one of several paths. Some of the loops and connections are obvious, some not so obvious, and some sufficiently ambiguous (or completely vestigial, perhaps?) to keep you thinking long after the movie is over. Beautifully, cast, photographed, and acted, Mulholland Drive offers intellectual engagement of the abstract kind. What more could you want?
Rating: 
Summary: Stop making sense.
Review: Very well acted and the first 2/3rds was worth watching. However the entire audience laughed on the way out of the theater over how totally incomprehensible the film was. Was it a dream, there is no way of knowing but who cares. We all have strange dreams sometimes; is that an excuse to make an incoherent movie?
Rating:
Summary: Another gem from the master of the cinematic subconscious
Review: "Mulholland Drive", like most of Lynch's work, is not meant to be understood in a rational way. It is a movie of ethereal beauty, one of Lynch's best, in my opinion. This is true Lynchian magic, and if you want to know why he has such a devoted cult following, you should definitely see this movie.
In this particular film I think Lynch is trying to provoke us, even enrage us, by openly ridiculing our basically relative and ultimately bogus ideas of 'identity' or 'reality'. The movie opens with a botched murder attempt, and from there spirals into a darkly erotic and dreamlike tale of madness, amnesia, mystery, and troubled beauty. The scene in the theater is maybe one of the most unforgettable and hypnotic scenes I've ever encountered in a movie, and surrealism addicts (like myself) will be engrossed by it from start to finish. A masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: BEST MOVIE OF 2001 YET!!!!
Review: I had the priviledge of viewing this picture while i was in New York on the day it came out, and I know this movie isn't all over the country packing theaters, but it should be. Why you might ask? Because it's filled with art, culture, and it should make anyone free their mind and keep an open mind. The performances were spectacular, the screenplay was surreal and phenominal, and Lynch is just a genius as a film maker. Let's just say this movie was so good that i'd pay 20 bucks just to see it again on the big screen. This is the only movie in history where i walked out of theater saying "I loved that movie so much, but I didn't understand it."
Rating:
Summary: an absolutely mesmerising film
Review: I have been waiting on this film for two years, since i first read about its pending release in TV guide. It was certainly worth the wait. First, i am a huge fan of Lynch's work.. but, i am not of the opinion that he can do no wrong. Lost Highway didn't really do it for me... it left me with too many questions, and not enough clues. Mulholland Drive, however, is a work of art. In this film, Lynch takes his characters on a ride unlike anything i've ever experienced. It starts out seeming like a typical film-noir amnesia tale, but that's only the beginning folks... a simple diversion to get you comfortably settled in your mind before he pulls out the big guns. And they are big guns.
This film has the perfect mix of humor, emotion, terror, and mystery. I've never felt so much for film characters since Dorothy Valence in Blue Velvet. And it genuinely hurts to see them go through what they go through. But, as Lynch reminds us in one of the first scenes in the movie.. innocence is almost a parody of itself.. and in a place like Los Angeles, something as precious as innocence will inevitably be tested.
Rating:
Summary: Hollywood Lost and Found
Review: To understand Mulholland Drive, I had to see it twice, though I'm still not sure I fully understood it. The first time I saw it I was puzzled by the last third of the movie, not quite sure who was who, what was dream, what was fantasy, what was hallucination, and what was real. After watching it a second time, I came to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter. Like the MC said at the Club Silencio: "All is illusion." I was impressed with David Lynch's unwillingness to allow the viewer to arrive at any pat, easy interpretations of his movie. I wanted to leave the theater wondering what I had just seen, to ruminate over certain scenes and images without losing that intriguing sense of mystery that pervades most of David Lynch's work. I think the movie is some type of delirious fantasy in the mind of the Diane Selwyn character shortly before her suicide, and that Betty and Rita are imaginary selves in some type of virtual reality, but then, that doesn't explain everything. And so be it. Many of the scenes are complete unto themselves. I loved the movie audition in which an actress sings "Sixteen Reasons," followed by another auditioning actress singing "I Told Every Little Star." Leave it up to David Lynch to make something so sweet and innocent seem so sinister and chilling. I also loved the scene involving the movie director and the Cowboy up on the hill. I found it funny how the Cowboy said things without really saying anything, so typical of how we talk in our dreams. Overall, this movie is the story of so many aspiring actresses who come to Hollywood with stars in their eyes, but who fail in their ambitions and end up in a world they never expected.
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