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
Happy Days (play) this way but we never discover how she came to be trapped so. A number of suggestions have been put forth to explain where the idea for the original imagery originated. James Knowlson has suggested images from Luis Buñuel’s 1928 film, "Un chien andalou" or a photograph by Angus McBean of Frances Day. Beckett required the set to have "a maximum of simplicity and symmetry" with a "very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance". "What should characterise [the] whole scene, sky and earth", he wrote, "is a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the