Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet (1986) — watch online on iFILM — is David Lynch's landmark neo-noir thriller, starring Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper. College student Jeffrey Beaumont comes back to his sleepy hometown to look after his father. On the way home he finds a severed human ear lying in a field.

The police log the evidence and say nothing useful. Jeffrey keeps pulling the thread. It leads him to Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini), a nightclub singer living under the control of a man named Frank Booth (Hopper) — a character so genuinely disturbing that the film's reputation rests partly on that one performance. Laura Dern plays Sandy, the detective's daughter who helps Jeffrey map the darkness he's stumbled into.

Lynch was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. Angelo Badalamenti wrote the score, beginning a long creative partnership with Lynch. The film sits on virtually every serious list of American cinema from the decade — not because it's comfortable, but because it shows the rot beneath the picket fences better than anything else from that era. Stream Blue Velvet (1986) in full online on iFILM.