Ordinarily a David Lynch film arrives in the art houses festooned with superlatives, hailed by hordes of reviewers strewing palm branches and rose petals in its path, and immediately embraced by a consciously and proudly highbrow audience. His latest picture, "Inland Empire," however, practically slunk into town, a lonely, unheralded orphan, metaphorically abandoned on a cinematic doorstep in hopes of finding a warm and loving home. That prospect seems quite unlikely, for numerous very good reasons, most of them related to the entire body of Lynch's work.

"Inland Empire" represents either the zenith or the nadir of the academic self indulgence and pretension that characterize the director's career. It continues the nonsensical clumsiness, the stifling fraudulence, the heavy-handed whimsy of such overpraised titles as "Blue Velvet," "Lost Highway," and "Mulholland Drive," all of which drove the Lynch mob into ecstasies of praise and moments of Deep Thought. Whatever its innumerable defects, it also at least solidifies his claim to the title of auteur, not a value judgment, but simply an observation that the corpus of his work remains decidedly and recognizably his - would anyone else want to claim it?

Within its three excruciating hours of running time, the movie advances a half a dozen different plots, some of them vaguely connected to each other, but most entirely meaningless both in themselves and in their relationship to the major stream of action. It opens with a close-up of a phonograph needle on a spinning record, with a voice-over narrative in a foreign language (presumably Polish, in light of other scenes and sequences), then shifts to a stage set in Crayola colors, in which three people, dressed as rabbits but wearing ordinary clothes, speak banalities to each other, many of them bewilderingly greeted by canned laughter.

Those hideous rabbits pop up now and then throughout the film, disconnected like everything else from everything else. Changing color schemes and lighting, sets and locations, focal length and resolution, the film keeps shifting to other characters, including a woman who talks rather like Bela Lugosi (and looks rather less attractive) predicting the future for an actress named Nikki Grace (Laura Dern). Dern provides what continuity and linkage exists in "Inland Empire," playing not only the actress, who stars in a movie within the movie, but also the wife of an animal trainer in a small Polish circus, a foulmouthed whore with a Southern accent, and maybe other people as well.

One basic and badly handled gimmick in "Inland Empire" involves the familiar device of the actors finding themselves repeating in life their parts in the movie they are making, so that Dern falls for her co-star Devon Berk (some dull nonentity named Justin Theroux), paralleling the relationship between their fictional characters in the film. The director unfortunately squanders all the potential in that perfectly legitimate and artistically useful notion, by piling on numerous trivial mysteries, gratuitous shocks, and quantities of his usual ominous baloney, all of it set to a glacial pace.

Aside from employing such favorites as Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, and Harry Dean Stanton (in a part as empty as everyone else's) Lynch somehow inveigled Jeremy Irons to play the director of the movie within the movie. Those other hacks, along with a clutch of unknowns, wallow appropriately in this turgid mess of a film, but what possessed an actor of genuine stature to accept a part in "Inland Empire" remains a mystery.

Lynch apparently believes that the many changes of scene - a Los Angeles mansion, a Hollywood sound stage, a snowy Polish city, a depressingly low-rent living room - and the frequent introduction of eccentric characters - a chorus line of singing, dancing prostitutes, a silent man behind a desk who listens to one of Dern's spicier monologues, a cop interrogating a woman who stabbed someone with a screwdriver, etc., etc. - accomplish what his most enthusiastic fans claim as originality and perhaps even profundity. In reality, "Inland Empire" achieves nothing in the realm of art or entertainment, failing miserably to construct any meaningful form or emotional and intellectual content; it succeeds only in cruelly and condescendingly punishing its audience. Easily the worst movie of the year, it may be one of the worst movies of any year.

"Inland Empire" (R), directed by David Lynch, is now playing at Little Theatres.