Following the big-budget failure of Dune, David Lynch’s dazzling return to more personal filmmaking earned him a second Oscar nomination. The discovery of a severed ear leads clean-cut Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan) to uncover a nightmarish flipside to sleepy small town Lumberton, as he becomes dangerously complicit in the perverse relationship between tormented chanteuse Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and deranged gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper).

Informed both by the underground experiments of Kenneth Anger and the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Lynch’s visually arresting film has a singularly skewed power. Alan Splet’s dense sound design and the first of the director’s many collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti contribute to the film’s immersive texture, while Hopper is unforgettable as one of cinema’s most unsettling grotesques.

“The perfect shaken-not-stirred Lynchtini. Simultaneously a Freudian Mother of All Bombs, a satire on the Hardy Boys, a psychosexual audience crucifixion, an elegy for lost innocence and a genuine mystery.” Michael Atkinson

“Suburban America, freshly mown lawns and the tweeting of an artificial robin sitting alongside a dark underbelly represented by a severed human ear and a run-in with a psychopath... Taking the form of a surreal noir and as entertaining as it is horrifying, this is a film that is impossible to forget.” Justin Johnson

“Blue Velvet is the logic of dreams and nightmares translated into film language.” Nemanja becanovic

“Lynch was leftfield even in the 80s, but the mainstream has caught up to his ordinary-uncanny sensibility.” Phil Hoad

Film	Year	Director
The Apartment	1960	Billy Wilder
L'Atalante	1934	Jean Vigo
Blade Runner	1982	Ridley Scott
Blue Velvet	1986	David Lynch
CHUNGKING EXPRESS	1994	Wong Kar Wai
Don't Look Now	1973	Nicolas Roeg
Magnolia	1999	Paul Thomas Anderson
Once upon a Time in the West	1968	Sergio Leone
Short Cuts	1993	Robert Altman
Tokyo Story	1953	Yasujirō Ozu

Kevin Harley

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