Inland Empire

An actress named Nikki Grace wins the lead in a new production called On High in Blue Tomorrows. She and her co-star Devon Berk learn before shooting begins that the project is a remake of an unfinished film whose two leads died under unexplained circumstances. Nikki takes the part anyway, and as she settles into it her grip on reality loosens; the line between her own life and her character's, and between the present and the past, becomes impossible to place. David Lynch wrote, directed and produced the film, which stars Laura Dern as Nikki and her screen counterpart, with Jeremy Irons as the director, Justin Theroux as Devon, Harry Dean Stanton and Karolina Gruszka among a large credited cast.

The film runs three hours and was shot on digital video, a departure from Lynch's earlier work on celluloid. It is the fourteenth of the seventeen features he directed, arriving after Rabbits and before To Each His Own Cinema, and it draws on imagery he had developed in web shorts released beforehand. A budget of 15 million dollars was met with a worldwide gross of about 4 million, so it did not recover its cost at the box office. On IMDb it holds 6.8/10 from roughly 70,000 votes, and on TMDB 7/10 from a much smaller number. A critics' rating of 7.6/10 from 117 reviews sits above both audience figures.