April David Lynch Film Festival at Broadway Centre Cinemas 

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• David Lynch

David Lynch's passing on Jan. 16 marked the end of a remarkably original creative career, one that included visionary feature films and one of the most influential series in television history, Twin Peaks. This month, the Salt Lake Film Society honors Lynch with a festival of some of his most noteworthy work, including a short film program April 4-5.

April 4-5: The Elephant Man (1980) – The first of Lynch's three Academy Award nominations for Best Director came in this fact-based story of the Victorian London-era friendship between physician Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) and deformed sideshow curiosity John Merrick (John Hurt). Those two performances are both remarkable, but Lynch's direction captured both the horror of an increasingly mechanized society and the profound humanity involved in seeing beyond the skin to someone's soul.

April 11-12: Eraserhead (1977) – Maybe it is just a primal scream of parental anxiety; maybe it's a more general metaphor about dehumanization. However you interpret it—and as is generally true with Lynch, how it makes you feel is more important than what it means—the director's debut feature remains one of the most distinctive and unsettling films in the cult canon.

April 11-12: Mulholland Dr. (2001) – Salvaged from its origins as the pilot for a planned TV series, this psychological drama would be important enough for Naomi Watts' breakthrough role. But Lynch turned this material about the curdled dream factory of Hollywood into yet another exploration of identity filled with bone-deep dread, oddball humor and confounding imagery. Even if you can't fully process what it's "about," it still hits hard.

April 18-19: Lost Highway (1997) – Lynch could be at his most frustrating when trying to combine his surreal ideas with real-world consequences, so it's deeply weird when this narrative involves a character completely changing identities at one point, followed by police treating that as an actual mystery to solve. It still features some of Lynch's finest crawl-into-your-own-skin moments—and if nothing else, he understood earlier than most that Robert Blake should be considered terrifying.

April 18-19: Blue Velvet (1986) – For my money, and as "normie" an opinion as it might be, this is still Lynch's movie masterpiece. Yes, it served as the foundation for Twin Peaks' exploration of the rot beneath the surface placidity of American suburbia, and launched the creative partnership with Kyle MacLachlan. But it also digs at the ugliness potentially lurking beneath any "nice" façade, while also allowing Dennis Hopper to go wonderfully batshit as gas-huffing, sadistic Pabst Blue Ribbon aficionado Frank Booth.

April 25-26: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – As a young Twin Peaks fan, I raced out to see this on opening night, and came out thinking, "What the hell was that?" A recent re-watch showed that while the prologue material still really doesn't work—yeesh, Chris Isaak's performance—this was a perfectly natural outgrowth of TP's story, and povided a showcase for a performance by Sheryl Lee that includes some of the most emotionally raw acting I've ever seen.

April 25-26: Wild at Heart (1990) – Not a big fan of most of the Elvis-in-Oz craziness that makes up this wild road trip, though Lynch clearly understood how to channel Nicolas Cage at his Nicolas Cage-iest. Still, it's got some real juice when the content hits lizard-brain fears, like the scene in which a dazed Sherilyn Fenn staggers around a car wreck, or Willem Dafoe's psychological assault of Laura Dern. "The world is wild at heart and weird on top," Dern's Lula says at one point—and even if this is "minor" by Lynch's standards, it still exemplified the way he knew how to mix wildness, weirdness and heart.

OTHER APRIL SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Brewvies Sunday Brunch: Clue (1985): The odd-sounding notion of turning a board game into a film and its multiple-endings gimmick led to box-office disappointment on its initial release, but its goofy charms have aged well in the 40 years since. Join the crowd at Brewvies (168 W. 700 South) on Sunday, April 6 at noon, admission $3. brewvies.com

Indiana Jones and the Return to Megaplex: The original Indiana Jones trilogy—1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1984's Temple of Doom and 1989's Last Crusade—come to the big screen for individual showings, plus a marathon presentation on Saturday, April 19 for $29.99. Visit the website for theaters and showtimes. megaplextheatres.com