David Lynch

CHICAGO – Being a child of the ’80s, I can vividly remember when David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” took the world by storm. I was too young to see it in theaters but I would be an early teen when the decade ended and the film made a stunning number of lists of the best films of the previous ten years. I could finally see what the fuss was all about on VHS. I would never be the same. There are a few movies I can point to and say, “That shaped the way I look at film.” “Blue Velvet,” recently released on Blu-ray to celebrate its 25th anniversary and complete with 50 minutes of never-before-seen deleted scenes, is one of those movies.

CHICAGO – Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” pulses with the kind of energy and life that we only see from cinema a few times a year.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – When David Lynch came to Chicago for an “Inland Empire” screening back in 2007, he offered memorable advice to a moviegoer baffled by his work. He said that his audience should meditate not on the “intellectual experience” provided by his films, but the emotional ideas that they conjure. Meditating on anything else would prove useless because, as Lynch put it, “If you meditate on buttermilk, you’ll end up going to the dairy.”

CHICAGO – Universal Home Video is releasing an impressive wave of catalog titles in HD for the first time this month and we have a preview of them just for you, including a great 15th Anniversary Edition of “Apollo 13,” and HD transfers of four movies that have little in common but the studio that released them: “Dune,” “The Jackal,” “Out of Africa,” and “Traffic”.