Lost Highway

Dallas Observer Andy Klein

His most thoroughly surreal work since Eraserhead, this two-hour-plus fever dream is more of one piece than Fire Walk with Me and less desperate and jokey than Wild at Heart.

Empire Christopher Hemblade

This is delightfully bonkers; an eerie and edgy outpouring that makes Twin Peaks look like Moonlighting.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

It's a weird movie, in that spooky/sicko, deadpan way that Lynch's movies always are, and it's guaranteed to repel anyone who likes entertainment wrapped in tidy resolutions and optimistic fade- outs.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Properly speaking, this isn't a movie with characters but with figures, each of them as overblown as a plastic inner tube.

The New Yorker Michael Sragow

The first half of this 1997 movie suffers from abstraction. Still, it's a compelling erotic nightmare.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Lost Highway is unusually bizarre even for this atypical director. Co-written by Barry Gifford, the film ventures deeper into the nearly psychotic supernatural than any feature Lynch has previous overseen.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Beautifully made but emotionally empty, it exists only for the sensation of its provocative moments.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Although uneven and too deliberately obscure in meaning to be entirely satisfying, result remains sufficiently intriguing and startling to bring many of Lynch's old fans back on board for this careening ride.

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

Lost Highway, an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of "Blue Velvet," the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The film actually deserves four stars for its imaginative style and astonishing suspense, zero stars for its shameless exploitation of violent shocks and loveless sensuality.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

David Lynch's eye-popping imagery is buried under an avalanche of self-indulgence.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

It's a soulless and dull bit of showmanship, but it sure sounds profound.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Lynch, who penned the screenplay with novelist Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart), seems to be attempting to capture not just a sense of place and time (it never works -- Lost Highway is wholly, irrevocably, out of place and without any linear time or time line to speak of), but also a sense of madness.

Newsweek Jack Kroll

In Lost Highway, reality has become a dream. But Lynch has forgotten how boring it is listening to someone else's dream.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

In Lost Highway, David Lynch dabbles in spooky, chilly implication and a sort of hip incoherence.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Here, Lynch has traded some of his disturbing originality for noir formula and schticky weirdness.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

A feature-length Twilight Zone episode, filtered -- not entirely successfully -- though the sensibilities of David Lynch and his Wild at Heart collaborator, Barry Gifford.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

A slow, ponderous, ultimately unsuccessful exercise in cerebral nihilism.

Slate David Edelstein

Lost Highway, David Lynch's first movie in five years, is a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes.