[1] Set in Twentynine Palms, the film is about an American photographer and his Russian girlfriend as they scout locations for a photo shoot.

Stopped by a pick-up full of rednecks, David is beaten and raped while Katia is stripped and forced to watch.

[3] Lisa Nesselson of Variety magazine wrote "A "Zabriskie Pointless" for the new millennium, Bruno Dumont‘s third feature, Twentynine Palms, is a narcolepsy-inducing road movie in which an American guy and a French-speaking babe get in a red Hummer and drive toward the titular California desert destination.

"[4] Ty Burr of The Boston Globe described the film as "a textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall".

[5] In an article for the Christian Science Monitor, David Sterritt wrote about the film "While many will find the movie dull and distasteful in the extreme, it has deeply serious ideas at its core - the same subtly philosophical and implicitly theological concerns that mark Dumont's earlier films, which also criticize people who live entirely in the physical realm of existence at the expense of mental and spiritual perceptions.