New Print!

“The last real earthquake to hit cinema was David Lynch's Blue Velvet-I'm sure directors throughout the film world felt the earth move beneath their feet and couldn't sleep the night of their first encounter with it back in 1986,” Guy Maddin wrote in The Village Voice in response to this twentieth-anniversary re-release of Lynch's color-saturated noir. Lynch posits a small-town America steeped in psychic dread, where evil lurks beneath the manicured lawns. The plot concerns amateur sleuth Kyle MacLachlan's encounters with bruised chanteuse Isabella Rossellini, girl-next-door Laura Dern, and sociopath-next-door Dennis Hopper; after a series of sordid set pieces, the bluebird of happiness finally arrives, but it's an automaton with a real bug in its beak. “No one could quite match the traumatizing combination of horrific, comedic, aural, and subliminal effects Lynch rumbled out in this masterpiece. . . . Still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain after twenty years” (Maddin).

Blue Velvet is repeated on Saturday, September 2.