Mulholland Drive (2001)

Consistently hailed the best film of the 21st century (not least in a recent BBC Culture poll of 177 international film critics), David Lynch's quintessential neo-noir is now available in a new 4K digital transfer, the restoration of which was supervised by Lynch himself.

 

Naomi Watts (Birdman, Funny Games) gives a career-making performance as aspiring actress Betty, who after arriving in Hollywood, befriends an amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) and tries to help her recover her memory. The film establishes these characters but then proceeds to subvert any certainty about them, instead offering a swirling atmosphere of increasing surrealism.

 

This beautiful, weird and entrancing film was categorised on its original release as a psychological thriller, but holds far stranger depths than this would suggest. As twisting and turning as the Hollywood road it takes its name from, the film plays as if it arose as a series of images directly from Lynch's subconscious.

 

A story about Hollywood - what it is and how it operates, its powers of myth, illusion and delusion - these ideas and many others swarm out of this cryptic, seductive and disruptive film: a monumental classic by one of the masters of contemporary cinema.