"And then there's David Lynch, who's confrontational, hallucinatory minimovie is so strange and so abrupt that you're not sure what you're seeing even as you watch. It can perhaps best be summarized as another, characteristically Lynchian, but completely freestanding portrait of a divided consciousness. First we see police discovering a body in a shadowy garden (with none of the angelic natural light that most of the other films capture), then a woman sitting in a living room alone, and then, via smoke-dissolve, a terrifyingly brief view of a semi-industrial hell with faceless drones performing indiscernible labor around a nude woman imprisoned in a giant glass cylinder. Lynch then pans to an oily sheet that suddenly bursts into flames and burns away; through it, we see the police enter the woman's living room, presumably with ominous news. Scored by Badalamenti, the Lynch short may be as inscrutable as his last three features, but at 52 seconds it has a fleeting malevolent force - like the changes in light you're not quite sure you saw in the Eraserhead radiator. Give the opportunity to mark the artform's anniversary with a formal statement, Lynch instead pursued his obsessions come hell or high water. For nearly a minute, Lumière et Compagnie isn't merely a commemorative operation, but a fresh expedition into unknown territory."