“By turns infuriating and exhilarating, Inland Empire is David Lynch gone senile: whereas cinema’s dream curator struck gold with the relatively logical narrative capsizing of Mulholland Drive, his latest plunges deeper in search of Hollywood’s back entrances and dark portals, and rarely if ever resurfaces for air. While bewilderment is synonymous with Lynch movies, Inland Empire is so far removed neurologically from anything else in the director’s oeuvre that Lost Highway comes across as unfurnished and comparatively sane; thus, in achieving singularity, it approaches the very edge of insanity. Grasping a long overdue lead role with two hands, Laura Dern (magnificent, playing her most fucked-up character since Citizen Ruth) stars as an actress cast in a promising melodrama – a Polack folktale which just happens to be a remake of a cursed screenplay. There are also phantom prostitutes, musical numbers, sitcom rabbits, copious cameos, and ever-present signs of lurking evil to contend with.” TIM WONG’s tango with Lynch’s latest continues....[Read More]

KATE BLACKHURST on Half Nelson’s dynamic duo, Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps: “It does seem an insubstantial basis for a friendship, but the acting is so good that it works; Gosling is perfectly understated and Epps is the best child actor I’ve seen in a long time without a hint of cutesy precociousness.” She also considers Anton Corbijn’s Control: “The fact that it’s not all doom and gloom is due to fantastic scriptwriting and a stellar supporting cast… [it] ends, as of course you would expect, with ‘Walk in Silence’, and the welling up of emotion induced by that song is an incredible thing to take away from a cinema.”

And in the penultimate weekday report from our Wellington Film Festival correspondent, JOE SHEPPARD calls the shots on The Comics Show (“Shitty stereotypes have always plagued the funnybooks, but [Shirley] Horrocks never falls for all that and quickly gets past the emo/teenage years of marginalised navel-gazing and onto the social commentary”), A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (“Mistakes of the past flash quickly from all directions, like knives; the dual narratives overlap and blur; the voiceovers and title remain obscure: Guide is not an easy film but perfects the art of menace at the heart of a nuclear family about to explode”), and The Unpolished (“With a dual life in Portugal and a life on the run, it might look on paper like The State I Am In, but in exposing the selfishness and hypocrisy that lies behind free love and moral creativity, The Unpolished shares more in common with The Edukators”).