Mulholland Drive is coming back to cinemas

With David Lynch’s classic returning to the big screen, and Twin Peaks back on the small screen, 2017 is shaping up to be a good year

This is a great time to be a David Lynch fan. His 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet, is currently doing the rounds in UK cinemas to celebrate its 30th anniversary, and a great Lynch documentary, called David Lynch: The Art Life, is released next year filled with intimate interviews with the director and footage of him painting in his LA home. And of course, a new series of his cult television show Twin Peaks is returning in 2017, a full 27 years after the last.

Lynch fans will also be delighted with the news that his Hollywood-set neo-noir Mulholland Drive will be returning to UK cinemas in the form of a new 4k digital transfer of the film that’s been supervised by Lynch himself.

Originally conceived as a TV pilot but rejected, Lynch turned the ashes of that project into a beguiling masterwork, taking his dreamlike aesthetic to new extremes: the film takes a trip through LA’s dark underbelly following a mystery involving two women – one an amnesiac (Laura Harring) the other a would-be Hollywood starlet (Naomi Watts) – before going in even more bizarre and thrilling directions.

If one film deserves a revival it’s Mulholland Drive. Back in August, the BBC polled over 177 film critics from around the world to find the best films of the 21st century so far. Of course, Lynch's film topped the list, beating the likes of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.

The new 4k digital print will receive its UK premiere at Birmingham’s Flatpack Film Festival, which takes place 4-9 Apr. The film will then be released by the ICO in cinemas on 14 Apr, followed by a new special edition DVD and Blu-ray on 1 May by StudioCanal. Enticingly, StudioCanal hint that they chose this date “to coincide with the hotly anticipated return of David Lynch’s cult TV show Twin Peaks,” which will be music to fans' ears as Showtime have been very tight-lipped about when the new series will air on the channel.