Another extreme exploration of the darkness within, Lost Highway (1997) marked David Lynch's cinematic and artistic comeback after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). A bold move away from typical Hollywood narrative, Lynch and co-writer Barry Gifford craft a quintessentially Lynch-ian mind game of multiple identities, heroes, villains, and femme fatales that defies conventional space and time. Spiked with such evocative film noir images as a highway at night and a burning cabin, Lost Highway's tale of jealousy, murder, and retribution becomes the ultimate noir fever dream of sexual terror, yearning, and violence, yet Lynch still finds a hopeful space for woozy romance between Balthazar Getty and Natasha Gregson Wagner. Even as the story flies out of control (though Robert Blake's disturbing "Mystery Man" seems to know all the answers), Lost Highway remains a sound/image tour de force, particularly in the ultra-moody first half before the cacophony explodes in the second half. Making its perversity the prime attraction, Lost Highway's ads trumpeted its two thumbs down from mainstream critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel; Lynch's next film, The Straight Story (1999), however, precisely lived up to its title.