Fire Walk With Me premiered at the Cannes Festival in 1992. One critic present there wrote: "Ciby 2000 presented a party that was also hosted by David Lynch among others. It was at a bar called Velvet complete with go go dancers of both sexes with bodies to make me run for the nearest plastic surgeon for emergency relief. Spent part of the evening talking to director Charles Lance and also Peter Fonda."

Like Wild at Heart it was attacked or ignored by many reviewers, but this time it was also ignored by the cinema audiences.
In the U.S. it gained only about 4 million $, in Germany the movie had only 140.000 viewers. (Nevertheless Fire... reached it break-even point through the overwhelming success in Japan).

Fire Walk With Me disappointed those who had not fully watched the series as well as those who did, because many popular figures were cut from the final version. According to Mary Sweeney, the movie was cut down from 5h 40 min to 2 hours. The "Director´s Cut" features many characters, that were not included in the actual version (Russ Tamblyn, Warren Frost, Everett Mc Gill, Richard Beymer and  Harry Goaz).

In the series, it the viewer perceived the world of Twin Peaks with Agent Cooper`s eyes: that means with amazement, awe, if not love, in Fire Walk With Me, the perspective has changed dramatically, and the small town near the Canadian border looks entirely different: The colours have changed to a palette of browns and bleaker colours. Places like the "RR"-diner have lost their aura simply by using a different camera-angle and music.   

To some extent the negative response to Fire Walk With Me is clearly Lynch`s fault: it is downright misleading to call it a Twin Peaks movie, for it is obviously not: Part of the plot is set in another town without any chracter of the series which never was the case with "Twin Peaks". It would have been better to label it "These are last seven days of Laura Palmer" as it was subtitled in some countries.

Even if it is still a wonderful movie, one can`t blame the critics for axing it: watching the Blue Rose - scene for example, one can literally imagine the reviewers make their minds up for worst-movie-ever comments. The movie constantly trembles between arthouse-fancy and very personal scenes which makes it understandably unwatchable for many people.

Lynch has always defended Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and there are enough reasons  to justify this:

 The depiction of Laura being lost (in darkness and confusion, as Lynch might add) and Leland`s tour de force between utter depression and madness are Lynch at his very best. The movie itself is unbalanced, certainly not a fault but an apt echo of Lauras state of mind.

Laura being struck by the knowledge of another reality visualized with strobes of blue, will occur in Lost Highway (Fred Madison inside the prison cell) and The Straight Story (Alvin sitting in the living room with the lightning outside while he senses that his brother is in serious trouble) once more.