The City of Absurdity Lost Highway
a film by David Lynch
Reviews

Voodoo Road by Marina Warner, Sight and Sound, August 1997

La-La Limbo by Donald Lyons, Film Comment, February 1997

by Anthony C. Ferrante Film Threat, April 1997

by Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times, 02/97

by Todd McCarthy Daily Variety Chief Film Critic

By Janet Maslin New York Times, February 21, 1997

Highway to Heck by Stephanie Zacharek, February 28, 1997

Mild at Heart by Richard Corliss, Time, March 3, 1997

'Lost Highway' to Nowhere by Desson Howe, Washington Post, February 28, 1997

"Highway" takes a few wrong turns by Beth Pinsker, The Dallas Morning News, February 28, 1997

Return of the Lynch mob by Dennis Lim, Independent on Sunday, February 23, 1997

Lost Highway Travels a Weird Route by Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, February 28, 1997

Wandering Lynch's Lost Highway By Mike Clark, USA TODAY

Empire Magazine UK, August 1997

Driven to the edge of the mind By Quentin Curtis, The Daily Telegraph, August 22, 1997

Lost and Found By Mark A. Altman, SciFi Universe, April 1997

Mild at Heart By Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly, February 21, 1997

'Lost Highway' soon loses its way By Jeff Strickler, Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 28, 1997

By Eleanor Ringel The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 28, 1997

Shock Cinema from "Shock Cinema", November 1996

by F.X. Feeney from Mr. Showbiz, February 1997

by Richard Rayner Harper's Bazaar, February 01, 1997

Sreen It! by SCREEN IT! Reviews for Parents, February 17, 1997

Review snips from Paper Magazine & Vogue (with many thanks to Jennifer)

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Review Snips

from PAPER Magazine, 2/97
by Dennis Dermody

A menacing cloud hangs over David Lynch´s brilliant nightmarish new creepfest. What begins as the story of a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette)who receive mysterious videotapes showing static shots of the outside of their house suddenly escalates into violence, murder and madness. LOST HIGHWAY has the crazed logic of a bad dream, though unlike any you've ever had: characters reappear in different bodies; a man in a prison cell becomes someone else; a grinning chalk faced Robert Blake keeps popping up like a demented gnome. The Lynchian universe, with its muted walls, pale girls with black fingernails and extraordinary sound design, is unique and unnerving. Watching this film is like pressing a seashell to your ear while someone holds a gun to your head. Just the simple act of Pullman receeding into the shadows of his bedroom can fill you with inexplicable dread.

from VOGUE 2/97
A creepy David Lynch special
by John Powers

Bill Pullman plays Fred Madison, an overwrought saxophone player prone to terrible, baffling hallucinations- he can no longer tell what's real. He may or may not have killed his succulent wife, Renee (played by Patricia Arquette), who may or may not be having an affair. But before Fred's situation becomes clear to him (or us), he abruptly disapears and the movie launches into a parallel story about an auto mechanic, Pete (Balthazar Getty), who's lured into an affair with a gangsters girlfriend, Alice. This femme fatale is also played by Patricia Arquette- now a flagrantly sexy bruised fruit of a blonde who may actually be Fred's wife, Renee, just as Pete may (somehow) be Fred.

Lynch has always cared less about telling stories than creating a dark hypnotic mood. Nobody since Kafka has been better at conjuring a nightmarish feeling, the blend of queasy comedy and visceral dread that gives LOST HIGHWAY its sting. Fred has a hilariously spooky encounter with a white faced stranger (Robert Blake) that transforms a cellular phone into something uncanny & sinister. And there's a breathtaking desert sequence in which automobile headlights turn two lovers' naked bodies so incandescently white that they seem to be making love at the heart of a nuclear blast- it's the most beautiful sex scene in years. Such moments remind you that Lynch is one of the few living filmmakers kissed by genius.


Ready for some Hell? Director David Lynch (BLUE VELVET, TWIN PEAKS) is about to give you some. In what is being called the darkest & most provocative film to ever come out of Hollywood....get down on your knees for LOST HIGHWAY. "It's pure evil", revealed a Hollywood insider, after Tuesday nights industry screening of the new OCTOBER FILMS release, "A pure nightmare. I wanted to find the nearest church to get my soul back after I saw it. And I havent been to church since I was 13. " LOST HIGHWAY is easily the most intense film ever to be declared hip. A dizzying twist of non-stop nightmare scenes designed to upset & unbuckle the viewers faith in sanity. Others have tried to take us there, but no one's gone this deep <snip> The film apparently has no one specific moment that is at the root of all of this pre-release fuss. (there is a brief shot of a human mutilation and some sprinkles of vile porn moments-all slight) Rather, theres a feeling that a greater dynamic is at play...Director Lynch is using intense psychological warfare on his viewer. No moral boundry whatsoever is found in the landscape Lynch paints. Scene after scene it pounds into you: evil, chaos & death are sexy. "It's the biggest mind game ever presented to the american moviegoer," laughed a second source" People will be arguing over its meaning for a generation.

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© Mike Hartmann
mhartman@mail.uni-freiburg.de