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
The Big Swallow "makes imaginative use of an extreme close-up to create one of the seminal images of early British (and world) cinema, as effective in its way as the slashed eyeball of "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and of just as much appeal to the Surrealist movement." The film, however, "might have been still more effective if Williamson had omitted the second and third shots," in which he, "cuts to the photographer apparently disappearing into a black void, and then back to the man who retires munching him up and expressing great satisfaction, "since they detract from the logical purity of the first,