Wild at Heart + Blue Velvet

Honouring the late, great David Lynch. Both a midnight-movie icon and an art-house visionary, this groundbreaking auteur created a surreal and singular style that blended midcentury nostalgia and nightmare expressionism, perfectly encapsulated by this double feature.

WILD AT HEART (1991) | MA15+

The forces of good and evil that Lynch had limited to a small town four years earlier with Blue Velvet are blown out into the larger expanse of the American highway in Wild At Heart, an unruly road movie that lives up to its title and then some. After serving prison time for a self-defense killing, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) reunites with girlfriend Lula Fortune (Laura Dern). Lula's mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd), desperate to keep them apart, hires a hit man to kill Sailor. But he finds a whole new set of troubles when he and Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), an old buddy who's also out to get Sailor, try to rob a store. When Sailor lands in jail yet again, the young lovers appear further than ever from the shared life they covet.

BLUE VELVET (1986) | R18+

With intense performances and hauntingly powerful scenes and images, Blue Velvet is an unforgettable vision of innocence lost, and one of the most influential American films of the late twentieth century. Home from college, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) makes an unsettling discovery: a severed human ear, lying in a field. In the mystery that follows, by turns terrifying and darkly funny, writer-director David Lynch burrows deep beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town life. Driven to investigate, Jeffrey finds himself drawing closer to his fellow amateur sleuth, Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), as well as their person of interest, lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini)—and facing the fury of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a psychopath who will stop at nothing to keep Dorothy in his grasp.