Inland Empire (film) it "A dazzling and exquisitely original riddle as told by an enigma" and Jim Emerson (editor of RogerEbert.com) gave it 4 stars and praised it: "When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's "Sunset Boulevard", Lynch's "Persona" or Lynch's "8½", they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", Buñuel and Dalí's "Un Chien Andalou", Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon" (a Lynch favorite) and others". However, Carina Chocano of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that "the film, which begins promisingly, disappears down so many rabbit holes (one of them
Persona (1966 film) of a second and intended to be "subliminal". The sheep is from Luis Buñuel's 1929 "Un Chien Andalou", and the personification of Death was used in Bergman's 1949 film "Prison". Michaels linked the spider in the prologue with the "spider-god" in Bergman's 1961 "Through a Glass Darkly". Törnqvist said that the spider is visible under a microscope, indicating its use for study. When the boy reaches out to his mother, it is to shifting photographs of Ullmann and Andersson. In addition to the prologue, the story is interrupted by a midpoint celluloid break. Scenes creating a "strange" or "eerie" effect