Blue Velvet

Lynch’s color-saturated noir 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” (Guy Maddin).