Young lovers Sailor and Lula take off for New Orleans following Sailor's release from prison, with Lula's hysterical mother, a weary detective and a sinister hitman after them. During their journey, Lula and Sailor relate the events of their lives to date, while encountering a typical gallery of Lynch grotesques. After being stranded in a small town, Sailor agrees to join the loathsome Bobby Peru in a criminal venture.

The story is told with an almost cartoon-like ferocity and a virtuoso appreciation of how to make the ordinary seem strange and the strange seem unutterable. Lynch's camera plunges through sequences as if hell-bent on showing you something you've never seen before.

His imagination is likewise able to cause insomnia. Heads explode, dogs run off with severed human hands, and even sex becomes an erotic battleground that could well end in violent disaster. Lynch's portrait of everyday America is of a culture so ugly and so banal that when something awful happens it is not so much a surprise as perfect logic. If his lovers are slightly crazy, they seem to have every right to be.

His risk taking extends to the performances which have an air of frantic improvisation that lends an urgency to almost all of them. Cage and Dern have never been better and Diane Ladd (Dern 's real mother) and Harry Dean Stanton as the love-lorn detective are equally notable, as is Willem Dafoe as a crazed killer. The faces seem part of the nightmare as much as the action.

• dir: David Lynch

• Year: 1990

• country: US

• run-time: 2h 5mins

• rating: 18

Full £6.00

Concession: Pay What You Can

Doors 19:30 - Film 20:00