We are concluding our four month David Lynch retrospective by presenting The Elephant Man, his haunting sophomore feature, now in a breathtaking new 4K restoration from Paramount Pictures. One of the most emotionally resonant and visually arresting films of the 20th century, this is the perfect way to pay our final tributes.

Shot in stark, luminous black-and-white by the legendary Freddie Francis, and produced by Mel Brooks (yes, that Mel Brooks), this Victorian-era tragedy tells the true story of John Merrick (An unforgettable John Hurt), a severely deformed man exploited in a freak show before being taken under the wing of a sympathetic surgeon, Dr. Frederick Treves (a quietly commanding Anthony Hopkins). What follows is a delicate, devastating exploration of what it means to be human in a society obsessed with appearances.

With The Elephant Man, Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive) stepped into the mainstream without sacrificing a shred of his uncanny sensibility—crafting a deeply compassionate portrait of otherness that still stuns over four decades later.

The penultimate film in our Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective is his rarely-screen film from 1983: Nostalgia.

Set in Italy, Nostalgia follows Andrei Gorchakov, a Russian poet who is researching the life of an Italian composer while grappling with deep homesickness and a sense of alienation in a foreign land. As Gorchakov reflects on his past and the world he left behind in Russia, the film explores the themes of memory, longing, and the difficulty of reconciling one’s personal history with the present. 

The film’s intimate, reflective tone, combined with its stark, beautiful cinematography, earned Nostalgia widespread acclaim. It was awarded the Best Director prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, a recognition of Tarkovsky’s extraordinary ability to capture the emotional and spiritual depth of his characters. As a work of exile and reflection, Nostalgia serves as both a personal meditation for Tarkovsky and a universal exploration of the human condition, making it an essential part of his cinematic legacy.

David Cronenberg delivers an entirely new take on body horror, reinventing the game yet again with his new film The Shrouds. This dramatic sci-fi thriller is a reflective stunner that combines the maestro’s signature body horror with profound elder-statesman reflection. Entering his 80s, Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, History of Violence) continues to find new ways to innovate what can be done with bodies in cinema, losing none of his edge while demonstrating a true sense of empathy; the result is a film that astonishes while also being his most accessible film since Eastern Promises. 

In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy.