Barnes & Noble
Dreams of Hollywood stardom become nightmares in Mulholland Dr., a masterful psychological thriller from David Lynch. Newcomer Naomi Watts gives a breakout performance as an aspiring young actress whose friendship with a mysterious, voluptuously beautiful brunette amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) evolves into something much more. The pair's search for Harring’s identity becomes the film's main story line, but it's flanked by several obliquely connected subplots, all set against the backdrop of a Hollywood rife with Lynch's typically surreal quotient of freaks and weirdos, enigmatic cabals, and obscure conspiracies. The unraveling of the film's central mystery eventually dissolves the very fabric of screen reality, allowing a dark truth to gradually emerge. It's all mind-bending, to say the least, and consummately eerie, yet leavened by Lynch's trademark offbeat humor. Watts is nothing short of perfection: Her young, would-be starlet is sexy, eager to please, vulnerable, and afflicted with the kind of curiosity that kills cats -- qualities that make the Sapphic love story at the heart of the film both moving and intensely erotic. Lynch's longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti contributes a haunting score that works in tandem with an unnerving tapestry of aural textures to accentuate the aura of subliminal menace. But it’s the unique structure, in which conventional narrative progression is entirely replaced by dream logic, that the film achieves an almost psychedelic potency. Mulholland Dr. may have echoes of Lynch’s Lost Highway and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me but this modern masterpiece is in a genre all its own. Gregory Baird
All Movie Guide
David Lynch wrote and directed this look at two women who find themselves walking a fine line between truth and deception in the beautiful but dangerous netherworld of Hollywood. A beautiful woman (Laura Elena Harring) riding in a limousine along Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive is targeted by a would-be shooter, but before he can pull the trigger, she is injured when her limo is hit by another car. The woman stumbles from the wreck with a head wound, and in time makes her way into an apartment with no idea of where or who she is. As it turns out, the apartment is home to an elderly woman who is out of town, and is allowing her niece Betty (Naomi Watts) to stay there; Betty is a small-town girl from Canada who wants to be an actress, and her aunt was able to arrange an audition with a film director for her. Betty befriends the injured woman, who begins calling herself "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth. While Betty's audition impresses a casting agent, and she catches the eye of hotshot director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), Kesher's producers and moneymen insist with no small vehemence that he instead cast a woman named Camilla Rhodes. As Rita attempts to put the pieces of her life back together, she pulls the name Diane Selwyn from her memory; Rita thinks it could be her real name, but when she and Betty find a listing for Diane Selwyn and visit her apartment, they discover the latest victim of a mysterious killer who is eluding police detective Harry McKnight (Robert Forster). Rita's emotional identity soon takes a left turn, and it turns out that neither woman is quite who she once appeared to be. David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as the pilot film for a television series; after the ABC television network rejected the pilot and declined to air it, the French production film StudioCanal took over the project, and Lynch reshot and re-edited the material into a theatrical feature. The resulting version of Mulholland Drive premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where David Lynch shared Best Director honors with Joel Coen. Mark Deming
Entertainment Weekly
Mulholland Drive may on some level be a sacramental dream as rerun, but Lynch is such a hypnotic craftsman that he holds you in his thrall. Owen Gleiberman
Village Voice
Thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual.
J. Hoberman
New York Times
Its investigation into the power of movies pierces a void from which you can hear the screams of a ravenous demon whose appetites can never be slaked. Stephen Holden
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