"There's a baby at the hospital. And you're the father!...." If you've yet to catch up on the collected works of David Lynch – perhaps you're a newly minted Twin Peaks obsessive, or you saw the stunning Mulholland Drive and are itching for more – the good old Astor has answered your fever dreams with a retrospective of every narrative feature the out-there auteur has made.
From the black-and-white freak out of Eraserhead (1977) – possibly the worst date movie ever – all the way through to the Laura Dern epic Inland Empire (2006), the Lynchian oeuvre contains some of the strangest and most powerful visions ever committed to celluloid.
There's the riveting masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986), which takes the form of a crime movie and features Isabelli Rossellini, Dennis Hopper and Kyle MacLachlan giving career-best performances. There's the moving period piece The Elephant Man (1980) with John Hurt as the deformed hero and Anthony Hopkins as the doctor who rescues him from a sideshow. Check out Lost Highway (1997), a thriller with multiple personality disorder.
There are also The Straight Story (1999), about a man who drives his lawn mower across two states; the TV spin-off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992); and the erotic Wild at Heart (1990) with Dern and Nicolas Cage.
We have a soft spot, we admit, for Lynch's critically maligned adaptation of sci-fi novel Dune (1984). It's a savage, weird and psychedelic film, oddly like Game of Thrones in space.
You can see the full program (and book tickets) if you click on the Date and Times tab above. All tickets are $14.
Silencio!