‘Lost Highway’

No one has ever needed to tell David Lynch to stop making sense. From “Eraserhead” through “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” his films have focused on the creepy illogic of nightmare, on mocking reason and celebrating the dream state. With this director, what you get is what you see. “Lost Highway,” troublesome but also the director’s most accomplished work since “Blue Velvet” a decade ago, takes this tendency even further. Beautifully made but emotionally empty, this 1997 release exists only for the sensation of its provocative moments. Garnished with sex and violence, it alternates scenes that exquisitely marry sound and image with moments that seem to come from a metaphysical stage film. Working with co-screenwriter Barry Gifford (who wrote the novel Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” was based on), the director has taken traditional film noir elements--gangsters, youthful hunks, jazz musicians, unattainable women and implacable fate--and tossed them into a conceptual Mixmaster. The result is one weirded-out movie that plays as if it were coming and going at the same time. Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette (pictured with Balthazar Getty) and Robert Blake star (Cinemax Sunday at 11:50 p.m.).