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Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr. – why do David Lynch's films exert such a grip on our imaginations?

Let us start, as David Lynch himself did, with Eraserhead. I first saw it on the college film circuit in 1981, four years after its UK release – but I had been haunted by it long before seeing it. Even the small advert in the Evening Standard – a tiny version of the poster, with Jack Nance's appalled, ambiguous gaze, and that haircut, with, of course, its baffling title – compelled, and made me realise that I was going to have to see it one day. When I was old enough.

For it was an X certificate (now demoted to a 15), and it contains horrors, most notably the grossly deformed baby sired by the hapless Henry, which in the final scenes is subject to a gruesome dissection, leading to some kind of apocalypse. As a...

Movies play with audience expectations. Louis Lumiére's 1895 short "Tables Turned on the Gardener" concludes its one-minute length with a timeless sight gag. A few decades later, "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" pioneered the movie twist by revealing that the majority of its narrative took place within one man's disturbed mind. The twist eventually became commercialized as a sacred piece of information available only to those willing to pay for ...

Filed under: Columns, Cinematical

Welcome to a special edition of the bi-weekly Eat My Shorts column, shorter than usual and themed to April Fools' Day. I thought it appropriate to write on short films today because for a long time, to me, the format was synonymous with twist endings. I used to think most shorts were basically just simple gags or practical jokes adapted to the screen.

That's the way it seemed when I was in film school, anyway, with everyone's first-ever assignment to make a five-minute silent work, which tended to involve a humorous setup followed by a visual punchline. Basically something as slapstick-simple as the Lumiere's pioneering 'L'arroseur arrosé' (aka 'The Sprinkler Sprinkled'), which you can watch after the jump.

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Filed under: Columns, Cinematical

Welcome to a special edition of the bi-weekly Eat My Shorts column, shorter than usual and themed to April Fools' Day. I thought it appropriate to write on short films today because for a long time, to me, the format was synonymous with twist endings. I used to think most shorts were basically just simple gags or practical jokes adapted to the screen.

That's the way it seemed when I was in film school, anyway, with everyone's first-ever assignment to make a five-minute silent work, which tended to involve a humorous setup followed by a visual punchline. Basically something as slapstick-simple as the Lumiere's pioneering 'L'arroseur arrosé' (aka 'The Sprinkler Sprinkled'), which you can watch after the jump.

Continue Reading...

From Buster Keaton to Borat, comedies are the films we love most - and also the hardest to get right. But what is the funniest movie ever? To launch our search, we asked a panel of very funny people to name their favourite

Comedy is the most complex cinematic genre, its success impossible to predict, its failure difficult to correct. Woody Allen's most popular film, Annie Hall, for instance, was saved from disaster by brilliant editing and a change of title (from Anhedonia). When the Marx Brothers left Paramount (where they did their most original work), their new producer Irving Thalberg insisted they test key sequences on stage for their first MGM film, A Night at the Opera

The first time a paying audience laughed in the cinema was on 28 December 1895, at the Lumiere Brothers' first public screening of a programme of brief unedited minute-length movies at the Grand Cafe in Paris.