His first feature in 21 years, this is also Monte Hellman’s finest work, a hall-of-mirrors masterpiece about moviemaking with diversions more complex, and more enticing, than in the director’s previous efforts (Ride in the Whirlwind, Two-Lane Blacktop). The story is a movie within a movie: after a woman puts a DVD of Road to Nowhere into a laptop in the first few shots, it’s increasingly unclear which movie we’re watching—Hellman’s own story or that DVD, whose plot is about the real-life disappearance of a North Carolina couple. The actual truth is less important than Hellman’s intermingling of illusion and reality. While in other movies this dichotomy is treated as liberatingly imaginative, or with a certain decipherable clarity—see Hitchcock’s references to cinema in Rear Window and Vertigo—the point here seems to be the construction of a world of illusions from which one cannot be extricated. Moviemaking—even when it enchants viewers by playing with multiple levels of reality—is, in the end, a prison. With Shannyn Sossamon and Tygh Runyan.