"David Lynch"

2001 · David Lynch · 147 min · Mystery

Mulholland Drive is David Lynch at his most seductive and his most cruel. The first two thirds play like a sun-drenched Hollywood mystery that's fun to follow, and then the final act rearranges everything you thought you understood. Naomi Watts delivers one of the great screen performances of the 2000s, shifting between two registers so completely that it feels like watching different actors. The film demands multiple viewings and refuses to confirm any single reading, which is either the point or the problem depending on your tolerance for unresolved ambiguity. Nothing else feels quite like it, and that's reason enough to see it at least once.

1990 · 3 Seasons · ABC, Showtime · Mystery / Drama

Twin Peaks is one of the most original and influential television shows ever made, a place where murder mystery meets surrealist art in ways that still feel startling decades later. Its first season is a near-perfect run of television. The second season's middle stretch is the weakest the show gets, and it gets weak enough to lose a lot of viewers. The Return brought it back with a creative ambition that rivals anything in the medium's history, even if it deliberately alienated as many people as it thrilled. This is a show that rewards commitment and tolerates confusion, and nothing else on television has ever sounded, looked, or felt quite like it.