"The teenage uncanny, a nostalgia so familiar it seems false, a facsimile, is pure David Lynch, who must — surely! — have seen Smooth Talk before casting Dern the following year in his own sunny-sinister coming-of-age story, Blue Velvet. The way Chopra adjusts her camera angles during the final scene, so that the staircase in Connie’s front hall begins to loom over her, is frightening — it’s a gradual vertigo of realization, of a secret second layer in the domestic…

Derek Jarman’s WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME? for ugly straight people: a behaviorist experiment via a staged fly-on-the-wall documentary, this time about the kind of bar where there are probably literal flies on the wall.

Jarman’s film, for which he built a gay club in early-80s London, gains unspeakable poignancy in hindsight for the looming AIDS plague; the Ross Bros couldn’t know they were making this on the cusp of another pandemic that would similarly wipe out spaces like the…