Rating: 
Summary: The Upside Down World of David Lynch
Review: It's always been a mystery to me how a film director can win a Best Director award for a film and yet the film itself will not be awarded Best Film. This happened this year at the Cannes Film Festival when David Lynch won for Best Director but "Mulholland Drive" did not win the Best Film (Palme D'Or)award. Curious, especially when the Director calls all the shots: screenplay, casting, cinematography, costumes, etc. It's also interesting to note that "Mulholland Drive" had originally been commissioned by ABC TV for viewing on the network...until they saw the finished product, that is. What did ABC expect? They had already dealt with Lynch on "Twin Peaks," probably the greatest and strangest TV series ever. Lynch actually understood and adhered to the drama series format with it's pauses for commercials, etc and formatted "Twin Peaks" appropriately. "Mulholland Drive" is another kettle of fish, though. It is brilliant, energetic, sexually explicit, exotic and too long. What it isn't is..........boring. And this is saying a lot as Lynch taxes your mind as well as your gut. "Mullholland Drive" is very much like a great Hitchcock film in that the actors are merely pawns in the propulsion of the plot: Naomi Watts, Laura Herring (ex-Miss Universe), Ann Miller (?) and Justin Theroux are only as effective as Lynch will allow them to be. (Noami Watts is a talent to be reckoned with, though). The plot itself is non-linear and flashes forward and back and up and down and down and out as is expected from David Lynch. Don't go to "Mulholland Drive" expecting to feel satisfied at the end...because you won't. What you will feel is challenged, upset, anxious, perplexed and slightly nauseous. You'll have at least a week's worth of water cooler debate fodder. This is a movie for Adults. All others are hereby warned.
Rating: 
Summary: clever puzzle
Review: this movie is a very clever puzzle consisting of many flashes real and subconcious that tie together. if you are able to tie this puzzle pieces together you will get enormous satisfaction with the movie. if not ask somebody to explain:)
trust though, this movie makes perfect sense!
Rating:
Summary: Silencio. Silencio. Silencio.
Review: A stunning, truly mind-blowing return to form for the Maestro of Dark Dreams.
A brunette in a black dress wanders away from a violent car crash. A wind lifts. She slowly descends the brush-covered hills, looking down on the lights of Tinseltown, shining below her like jewel box abandoned in a midnight desert.An apple cheeked blonde in a red, rhinestone-encrusted sweater leaves the doors of L.A.X. and smiles at the wide-open city of her starry-eyed dreams. The convergence of these two Hollywood archetypes (Rita Hayworth and June Allyson?) leads to a mystery that can never be solved; a mystery that leads us through the dark, inhumane underbelly of El Lay. Hollywood boardrooms with polished-wood tables and polished, deadly smiles. Bungalows dark and fetid as tombs. A lonely, colorless diner behind which a nightmare monster waits. And a midnight cabaret, The Club Silencio, where there is no band but you hear a band and a sad, tartish woman sings a Spanish language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying." She faints dead in the middle of the song. And her heartbreaking, ghostly voice goes on as she is dragged from the stage. This may well be one of the cinema's greatest and most strikingly original ruminations of the destructive, soul-devouring beast that is Hollywood since Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," (which Lynch has often cited as one of his favorites.) Which is the real story? Is "Rita" really a lost amnesiac without a name? Or is she a heartless, overripe movie-star/monster named Camilla? Is Betty really Betty? Or is she Diane Selway, teetering on the edge of insanity as she crouches on the sofa in her nightmare apartment, wild-eyed, unwashed and heartbroken, waiting for the last light to die? The dream ends. The dream begins. Identities change and fly back in the space of a celluloid frame. Plots and subplots and mysteries left hanging turn back on themselves and create new and infinitely more horrifying stories. And more mysteries sprout new and energized, ready to crawl under the door and chase us screaming endlessly into the night. This is a film of terror and dread, of absurdist comedy and social criticism. It is made from nightmares. It is filmed through a great, inscrutable darkness lit only on occasion by a hazy, lemony sun that seeps through the smoggy palm-trees, and moves sadly across the cracked, overgrown courtyards of the lost.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable
Review: If you're a big fan of linear storytelling, you probably already know to avoid David Lynch films, but here's my warning anyway-- this movie does not have a completely coherent plot. It tricks you too, because it does make sense for about the first two-thirds. Be that as it may, I thought this film was still a lot of fun. Naomi Watts gives a stellar performance as Betty, an aspiring starlet on her first visit to Los Angeles, who develops a friendship with a mysterious amnesia victim played by Laura Elena Harring. Harring's a bit vacant as an actor, as is Justin Theroux, who plays a young film director struggling to understand why production on his latest film has been shut down. I'm guessing they were directed to deliver their lines in such a flat way, but the two aren't quite skilled enough to pull this off in a manner that holds the audience's interest. All quibbles aside, there are some genuinely hilarious moments in this movie (check out the cameo by a certain one-hit-wonder country singer), and these serve as a nice counterpoint to the suspense that gradually builds throughout. Angelo Badalamenti's music is haunting, as always, and I agree with my fellow reviewer who praised the sound design. On the whole, it's not my favorite Lynch movie, but it's definitely in the better half of his canon. I would have loved to see it as a tv show.
Rating:
Summary: Nancy Drew goes to Hollywood.
Review: The young and beautiful but naive Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) leaves her home in Ontario for Hollywood and immediately finds herself mixed up with a mysterious amnesiac woman who calls herself Rita (Laura Harring). Betty has come to tinseltown hoping to become an actress, and, while trying to help Rita recover her identity, Betty crosses paths with film director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). Slowly a bizarre love triangle unfolds between the three characters, and Betty finds herself in an inescapable nightmare that may just be of her own making. After his surprisingly successful experiment with sentimental American heartland drama in "The Straight Story," director David Lynch returns with panache to the psycho-surreal territory he has claimed as his own. "Mulholland Drive" creates a new neighborhood in Lynchville bordered closely by "Fire Walk With Me" and "Lost Highway," and echoes of those two films are heard throughout "Mulholland Drive." Here are eerie archetypal messengers, an illusionist, mysterious puzzles and keys, an inexplicable corpse, malignant evil, and the most terrifying of dreams. Lynch's cast is, as usual, excellently suited to the strange goings-on. The three leads give subtly nuanced performances and are surrounded at all times by a number of excellent supporting actors. Dan Hedaya and Robert Forster have very small parts, as do Michael J. "Twin Peaks" Anderson, Ann Miller (a veteran of old Hollywood), and Lynch's longtime musical collaborator Angelo Badalamenti--but all of them add a wonderful spice to their scenes. Richard Green as the Magician and Layfayette Montgomery as the Cowboy both create defining and unforgettable Lynch characters. Two other spectacular features of the film bear mentioning. First is the soundtrack, which does a great deal to enhance the film's mood, from Badalamenti's typically brooding numbers and supporting tunes by Lynch and John Neff to the heartrending performance of Roy Orbison's "Crying" sung in Spanish, a capella, by Rebekah Del Rio. Second is the delicious non-linear plot, evoking inevitable associations with "Lost Highway." Anyone who had trouble with "Lost Highway," however, should not stay away from "Mulholland Drive." While one cannot promise that "Mulholland Drive" will be easier to swallow, comparing the two films will certainly do much to illuminate the exquisite madness of Lynch's method.
Rating:
Summary: that Lynch we came to love
Review: Ever since "Eraserhead" David Lynch has the notorious reputation of being the king of weird and the paranormal. Mulholland Drive just adds more icing to the cake as once again he tinkers with our mind and takes us so far passed the line that we forgot what it looked like. I caught Mulholland Drive at the Toronto international film fest and liked it alot. While it does take a good half hour to really get into it, after that your hooked. Naomi Watts performance deserves an Oscar nod if I ever saw one. If you were to close your eyes her performance would still blow you out of the water. However, where Lynch still shines bright is in the sound department. He's always been good with it and has made it his top priority but this soundtrack will be a must buy.
So if you like your Lynch raw and gritty, take Mulholland Drive into consideration. You wont regret it.
Rating:
Summary: Toronto Film Festival: Mulholland Drive Review
Review: I'll make this very short. The film is brilliant, and it's everything you would expect David Lynch to make. It's intelligent, beautiful and it incorporates every genre in one. Many people will not "get it" and the people who do will love the heck out of it. If you like Wild at Heart or Blue Velvet, or anything else that Mr. Lynch has done, go out and see the movie when it hits theatres. There is only one David Lynch, and there will never be another artist of his calibre. He is a genius. I just want to address a complaint I read in other reviews. The movie does NOT play like a cancelled television pilot, and everything makes perfect sense with a bit of thought. Every character serves his/her purpose. If you know of David Lynch's work, you know that he has an amazing sense of what is "cool". The music, dialogue and environments used in this film are totally David Lynch. You won't hear dialogue like this from any other director, because only someone as intelligent as David Lynch could or would speak like this. It works in this film, as it worked in Hotel Room, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet and Lost Highway.
Rating:
Summary: Lynch's best dream
Review: Apart from being a brilliant flip-off to the illusion-machine of Hollywood, "Mulholland Drive" is David Lynch's most thematically rich and successful film. Like his "Lost Highway," it involves parallel identities and a character's inability to confront a painful reality. Here these explorations are seamlessly interwoven into two thriller-like noir plots, one involving an actress fresh off the plane named Betty who tries to help an amnesiac woman she discovers in her shower, and the other involving a filmmaker who is being bullied into an artistic compromise by a shadowy Hollywood mafia. On the barest surface, that is...These two stories meet at a place which is never explicit, but for the presence of a mysterious figure called the Cowboy who appears thrice: first, giving some menacing advice to the filmmaker to do as he'd been instructed; second, telling Betty to wake up when she's sleeping (and thus we learn that she's actually a psychotically depressed failed actress named Diane); and third, he saunters by in the background at a party which all the characters have gathered. All of the cast is excellent, but particularly Naomi Watts, who effortlessly conveys the sad desperation of Diane's reality (which is a shock after the sunny alter-ego we have witnessed in her performance in the first part of the film). The cinematography is so thickly vibrant it is literally sur-real--that is, slightly exaggerated in its mahagonies and crimsons and alizarines tones. This DVD is okay. Be warned: Lynch forewent putting chapters in the movie, so it runs continuous (This could be annoying to those who like to skip around establishing connections between scenes). However, the DVD I purchased has strange glitches in the soundtrack--the sound fades a few notches at odd times. I'm not sure if this is a production flaw, or just my copy. As to the plot and what MD is about, another reviewer here, Willie Krischke from Oregon City, has nailed this one, I think. But "Mulholland Drive" seems an homage to all the people who've been wrecked either by the culture Hollywood or by the ancillary seediness of the place (one of Lynch's good friends, the actor Jack Nance, was murdered by thugs). The fact that he could probably get anyone in Hollywood to star in his films, but likes to employ actors who don't have steady work shows that he cares about the people behind Tinseltown Maya. But Lynch's motives, of course, are never that simple. He's one of the only filmmakers who understands the perversity or absurdity of a group of strangers who face a glowing screen in a darkened room, under the temporary control of someone not physically present--and exploits not only that darkness, but the penumbral state as we go to sleep and the comfortable world of identity and names disappear. "Mulholland Drive" is his best film.
Rating:
Summary: a beautiful masterwork
Review: This film has a haunting beauty that is akin to experiencing Klee upon the first time. The mystery and sensuality wrecks havoc of all your senses. I relished the experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Worse Than "The Village", with better tricks
Review: I saw the movie. I read all the explanations here and on Salon.com (which is the best I must admit). I get the movie although I admit at first I didn't-and not putting chapters in the DVD was just plain wrong. Here's my problem with this "Finnegans Wake" type of story telling which every one calls genius; it's so NOT! Anyone could craft an incomprehensible and esoteric story and claim artistry when people have to try to put it together before it makes any sense. Let's face it once you do put it all together is the story all that interesting? No. This is dazzling the audience with nonsense to cover lack of story telling skill. Fact is folks 'Finnegans Wake' is the product of a brilliant story teller's brain breaking wind, and so is this movie. There's nothing here.
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