Blue Velvet (1986)

Blue Velvet is a 1986 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written and directed by David Lynch. The film stars Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern, and is named after the 1951 song of the same name. The film follows a college student who returns to his hometown and discovers a severed human ear in a field, which leads him to uncover a criminal conspiracy involving a troubled nightclub singer.

The screenplay of Blue Velvet had been passed around multiple times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with several major studios declining it due to its strong sexual and violent content. After the failure of his 1984 film Dune, Lynch made attempts at developing a more "personal story", somewhat characteristic of the surrealist style displayed in his first film Eraserhead (1977). The independent studio De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, owned at the time by Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, agreed to finance and produce the film.

Blue Velvet initially received a divided critical response, with many stating that its explicit content served little artistic purpose. Nevertheless, the film earned Lynch his second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director, and received the year's Best Film and Best Director prizes from the National Society of Film Critics. It came to achieve cult status. As an example of a director casting against the norm, it was credited for revitalizing Hopper's career and for providing Rossellini with a dramatic outlet beyond her previous work as a fashion model and a cosmetics spokeswoman.

In the years since, the film has been re-evaluated, and is widely regarded as one of Lynch's masterpieces and is frequently cited as one of the greatest films of the 1980s. Publications including Sight and Sound, Time, Entertainment Weekly and BBC Magazine have ranked it among the greatest American films of all time. In 2008, it was chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the ten greatest American mystery films.