LOST HIGHWAY

Few filmmakers have shown themselves so adept at plumbing the depths of the subconscious without coming up for air as Lynch, whose LOST HIGHWAY—inspired loosely by still-fresh coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial—begins as a dark domestic drama concerning a sexually incompetent saxophonist (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette), morphs into a movie about a cocksman mechanic (Balthazar Getty) who gets involved with a gangster’s girl (Arquette, again), and ends with an unleashing of apocalyptic, purgative flame. Whether you take it as a cinematic depiction of a psychogenic fugue state or a free-associative disgorging of images from Hollywood’s id, Lynch’s film has the pull of a whirlpool and the terrible logic of a nightmare.