[In the following review, Kerr recommends Mulholland Drive as Lynch's “best and most erotic film since Blue Velvet.”]

Mulholland Drive is a road in Los Angeles that twists and turns for ten miles along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, and connects the Encino Reservoir, made famous in Roman Polanski's Chinatown, with the Hollywood Hills, made famous by that eponymous, cliched and ultimately irrelevant hillside sign. Mulholland is quite a drive, especially at night, and between Coldwater and Laurel Canyon there are lots of places to pull over, enjoy spectacular views of night-time LA, and reflect on how this land-based empyrean of myriad coruscating lights seems well named as “the City of Angels”—or at least it did until David Lynch, that modern Lucifer of cinema, decided to make a film about it.

And yet his is only a film by default. Mulholland Drive was originally developed by Lynch as a two-hour pilot for a television series in 1999, but it was rejected by ABC. That TV network's cock-eyed decision only lends inverse credence to what Woody Allen said about LA in Annie Hall: “They don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.” ABC's loss is cinema's gain, because Lynch's movie is the most atmospheric and enjoyable film about LA since Pulp Fiction. Quite simply, Mulholland Drive was too good for television.

A beautiful woman in evening dress (Laura Harring) staggers away from a car accident on Mulholland. She Jimmy Choos it as far as Sunset Boulevard; in real life, this really would be a hell of a walk, but as soon as you see that near-iconic road sign, with its echoes of Billy Wilder's screen classic (surely the best film about Hollywood ever made), you know that this, too, is going to be a film about Hollywood and the movies.

Our beautiful crashee (Harring is a former Miss America), stunned and amnesiac, takes refuge in a dilapidated, ivy-clad building that looks as if it might once have housed a Gloria Swanson; instead, it is home to the next best thing, in the 78-year-old shape of Ann Miller, who in real life was once one of MGM's biggest stars. The building, which comprises a number of apartments, managed by the Miller character, Coco Lenoix, is also occupied by an apparently ingenuous Hollywood hopeful in the wide-eyed, corn-fed person of Betty Elms (played by Naomi Watts).

Waiting for her big break in the movies, Betty decides to help “Rita” (a name borrowed from what else but a poster for Gilda about the ultimate femme fatale) find out who she really is—an ur-plot line that could have come from any one of a dozen Hollywood movies about amnesia, from As You Desire Me (Greta Garbo) to While I Live (Carol Raye). I've forgotten the rest. Meanwhile, in a sub-plot borrowed from The Godfather, no less, the movie director Adam Kesher (played by Justin Theroux, cousin of Louis) resists the menacing demands of a Tom Hagen-like lawyer that he cast a mob-choice starlet in his new film—a role for which Betty is also being considered. Gradually, the strands of this ensemble, David Altmanish story—most of them—come together in what is Lynch's best and most erotic film since Blue Velvet.

Lynch's deliberate and laid-back pacing, combined with Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score, suggests a drug-induced dream state. This is, after all, the city of dreams, and nothing in this film is ever quite what it seems. But then, what is reality in the capital city of make-believe? And where does fantasy end and reality begin? In a David Lynch film, reality is a feast that moves, discreetly, almost in proportion to “a mist,” as D. H. Lawrence has it, “of atoms, electrons and energies, quantums and relativities.”

My own experiences of life in Los Angeles have taught me that it is a place where everyone acts, all the time. Even when you are attending to the mundane necessities of life in Los Angeles—driving around, going to a midnight liquor store, eating breakfast at a Denny's—it is hard not to be possessed of the idea that you are already in a movie, if rather a dull one. It may be, as Raymond Chandler once said, that LA ought to consider itself damn lucky to have Hollywood; even so, the idea of Hollywood and the movies corrupts almost every aspect of everyday life in LA, so that it is almost impossible to meet a waitress who is not an actress, a personal trainer who is not a stuntman, or a clerk in a bookstore who is not a screenwriter. With so much real life on hold, dreams and fantasy control LA, rather like the Mormons run Salt Lake City. No wonder, as David Puttnam remarked when he quit the place, that leaving the city is like giving up heroin.

Mulholland Drive evokes these feelings in spades, and in a way I have not seen since Ella Kazan's screen version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. Watching this film, I found I was possessed by the spirit of Los Angeles and the emotional Detroit that is Hollywood, so that I could almost taste the margaritas at the Bar Marmont, or hear the meretricious movie-chatter in Le Dome.

If Lynch's film does have faults, they are the faults of Mulholland Drive itself: it meanders a little too much, and it is easy to feel lost, perplexed, even a little vexed that you're being taken for such a long ride, ultimately to nowhere in particular. But it's a wonderful, unforgettable drive while it lasts. Highly recommended.