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
Art film make "art films", and film critics did not use the term "art film". However, there were films that had sophisticated aesthetic objectives, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928) and "Vampyr" (1932), surrealist films such as Luis Buñuel's "Un chien andalou" (1929) and "L'Âge d'Or" (1930), or even films dealing with political and current-event relevance such as Sergei Eisenstein's famed and influential masterpiece "Battleship Potemkin". The U.S. film "" (1927) by German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau uses distorted art design and groundbreaking cinematography to create an exaggerated, fairy-tale-like world rich with symbolism and imagery.