Inland Empire

David Lynch’s labyrinthine Hollyweird freakout—his last feature to date—is his most uncompromising creation: a fugue-state trawl through the darkest realms of the subconscious that pushes his straight-from-the-id imagery and sinister dream logic to their extremes. When she accepts a role in a supposedly cursed production, a movie actor on the verge of a comeback (Laura Dern, in a fearless performance) finds herself tumbling down a series of increasingly disturbing rabbit holes (complete with literal rabbits) that lead her from the glittering heights of Tinseltown to the depths of human depravity. In his first feature shot on digital video, Lynch makes visionary use of the medium’s smudged textures and murky chiaroscuro to enhance the hallucinatory, nightmarish quality of what may be his magnum opus.