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
Filmmaking technique of Luis Buñuel were explained as having been put there to increase the running time. As a university student, Buñuel had studied entomology at the Museum of Natural History under the famous naturalist Ignacio Bolívar, and he had an early and lasting interest in the scientific documentaries of Jean Painlevé, which he tried to screen at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Numerous critics have commented on the number of sequences in his films involving insects, from the death's head moth in "Un chien andalou" and the extended scorpion scenes in "L'Age d'or" to the framed tarantula in "Le Fantôme de la liberté". Others have