David Lynch‘s Inland Empire, which has been shown at the New York Film Festival, is the filmmaker’s “most experimental feature since Eraserhead, according to N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. The story spins a familiar Lynchian fairy tale: a blond actress (Laura Dern, in a career-defining performance) lands a coveted film role and spirals down into a hallucination in which dreams become nightmares. There are whores, of course, with laughing and lurid mouths, and shadowy corridors that, in suggestively female anatomical fashion, lead to dark rooms. Mostly, though, there is Mr. Lynch, whose shards of dream logic sometimes achieve the convulsive beauty that Andre Breton wanted for surrealism and, at other times, feel like the disgorged bile of an artist who has taken the brakes off his sadism.”