Critically and moderately commercially successful, the film is largely considered to be one of David Lynch’s greatest pieces of work, with it earning him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director along with widespread acclaim from critics and audiences, ranking at #1 in a 2016 BBC poll of “The Best Films since 2000” and at #28 in a 2012 Sight and Sound critics’ poll of “The Best Films Ever Made”.

David Lynch originally conceived the film as a television series pilot and a large portion of the film was shot in 1999 with the plan to keep it open-ended for a potential series. Television executives however rejected Lynch’s concept and thus an ending was filmed and it instead became a feature film. It is this half-film/half tv series pilot, combined with Lynch’s characteristic surrealist style and with him also personally declining to provide any explanation of his intentions for the film’s events and general meaning, which has led to it becoming a strong subject of speculation open to multiple interpretations from critics, audiences and even cast members.

Since the film’s release, Mulholland Drive has critically received what Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross have described as “some of the harshest epithets and some of the most lavish praise in recent cinematic history”. While Roger Ebert praised it as the film of David Lynch’s career - a “Hollywood film noir (which)… the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it” - and added it to his Great Films list, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone observed that it “makes movies feel alive again”, Stephen Holden of New York Times ranked it “alongside Fellini’s 8½” for its “investigation into the power of movies” and A. O. Scott stated that despite its plot which many might consider an “offense against narrative order”, it is a film with ”an intoxicating liberation from sense, with moments of feeling all the more powerful for seeming to emerge from the murky night world of the unconscious”, it also has had its detractors with Rex Reed of The New York Observer calling it the worst film of 2001 and ”a load of moronic and incoherent garbage”, James Berardinelli who stated that there is “no purpose or logic to events” and that “Lynch is playing a big practical joke on us” and film theorist Ray Carney who notes that “you wouldn’t need all the emotional back-flips and narrative trap doors if you had anything to say (or)… if your characters had souls”.

The film’s tagline is “A love story in the city of dreams” and that is all which David Lynch provided as any form of commentary on the film’s meaning outside of the film’s own story. This therefore has led to the film being interpreted in a multitude of manners, all of which David Lynch – as Justin Theroux has described – is ultimately “genuinely happy” about, as he is, after all, a creative who primarily “works from his subconscious” and so “he loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations”.

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 84% with a critical consensus which reads “David Lynch’s dreamlike and mysterious Mulholland Drive is a twisty neo-noir with an unconventional structure that features a mesmerizing performance from Naomi Watts as a woman on the dark fringes of Hollywood”.