The Cinematheque

“Still enraptures and confounds … David Lynch’s Blue Velvet has lost none of its power to derange, terrify, and exhilarate.”

Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

David Lynch’s great masterpiece of the 1980s is perhaps the fulcrum of his career—the film that, after the critical and commercial cratering of Dune, rehabilitated his name and endeared his dark, distinctive filmmaking to a generation of disturbed moviegoers. A Hardy Boys whodunit staged as a psychosexual Freudian nightmare, Blue Velvet follows college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) as he’s drawn into a hometown mystery that starts with a severed ear and leads to a chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini) under the thumb of a psychotic gangster (Dennis Hopper), one of cinema’s most depraved monsters. The heady mix of golly-gee ​’50s Americana with neo-noir violence and sexual perversity incited controversy but nevertheless earned the auteur his second Oscar nomination for directing. Composer Angelo Badalamenti and newcomer Laura Dern, both future pillars of Lynchland, are spellbinding in their debuts for the director, while Eraserhead DP Frederick Elmes delivers his most lush and evocative work.

The December 11 screening of Blue Velvet will include ​“In Dreams” opening remarks by Artistic Director Shaun Inouye.

“The seamless blending of beauty and horror is remarkable, the terror very real, and the sheer wealth of imagination virtually unequalled in recent cinema.”

Geoff Andrews, Time Out