SIGHT AND SOUND, VOLUME 27, ISSUE 6, JUNE 2017

"I'll see you again in 25 years," says the Laura Palmer character to FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in the haunting final episode of the second season of David Lynch and Mark Frost's cult early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks, before clicking her fingers - backwards - and disappearing into the unsettling, red-curtained realm of the otherworldly Black Lodge. Well, here we are - just a little over 25 years later - and as a line of dialogue from the original series had it (and which Lynch's Twitter account tweeted to first swell fan excitement back in 2014), "That gum you like is going to come back in style", for later this month Twin Peaks returns to TV screens for a third season. On the eve of its highly-anticipated broadcast, Roger Luckhurst looks back at both the original series and the 1992 prequel film Fire Walk With Me to remind us just what made their genius marriage of the mundane and the macabre, the surreal and the soapy so beguiling and influential. He also explores how Twin Peaks's eccentric world of damn fine coffee, cherry pie, small-town oddballs and terrifying murder has only been enriched and expanded in the years since through a lively afterlife in fanzines, festivals, books, blogs and videogames. Just remember to heed the advice, "The owls are not what they seem..." Alongside Luckhurst's piece, Ronnie Hackston considers how Twin Peaks sits in the wider Lynch universe, and finds that there are motifs and themes that recur across his work, whether in Eraserhead, Mulholland Dr., Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, from chevron-tiled floors and red curtains to doppelgangers and split personalities. Elsewhere in the issue, we take a look at two new films that prove that animation filmmaking is in rude health right now. The Red Turtle, British director Michael Dudok de Wit's exquisitely animated tale of a man washed up on a desert island, has the distinction of having been initiated by Miyazaki Hayao's Studio Ghibli company, but as Dudok de Wit explains in an interview with his son, the writer and critic Alex Dudok de Wit, The Red Turtle's distinctive vision really lies in its fusion of Eastern and Western animation traditions. Another unlikely juxtaposition of styles lies at the heart of French filmmakers Claude Barras and C?line Sciamma's brilliant stop-motion animation My Life as a Courgette - that of the perceived escapism of the animated feature with the probing social realism of Ken Loach. As the filmmakers tell Kieron Corless, they felt that animation was exactly the right form they needed to tell a heartbreaking story of the losses and brutalities endured by a group of orphans in a children's home. One area in which the fusion of different forms has proven to be an especially rich and fruitful one is between cinema and opera. As a new adaptation of Luis Bunuel's surreal satire of bourgeois hypocrisy The Exterminating Angel debuts at London's Royal Opera House, Alexander Jacoby explores the long interrelationship between the two - from filmed operas by the likes of Luchino Visconti, Ingmar Bergman and Michael Powell, through to a more recent trend that has seen classics of the cinema screen in turn adapted for the stage. We also take a look at Frantz, the new film by one of contemporary cinema's most prolific and surprising directors, Francois Ozon. The French director has always shown a thirst for reinvention and that holds nowhere more true than in his latest, a stately and moving black-and-white costume drama set in the aftermath of World War I, about a French soldier who travels to Germany to visit the family of a soldier he may have killed. He talks to Trever Johnston. [...] (From the publisher)