The two best David Lynch movies according to Rotten Tomatoes

The film world lost one of its biggest and most unconventional names this week death of David Lynch, aged 78. Lynch was one of the most extraordinary directors to ever live, and in his filmography, the descriptor “one-of-a-kind” truly fits. Lynch was a one-of-a-kind director whose work was so unique, so stunning, yet so compelling that he was able to create indelible image after indelible image through stories set in the world of science fiction, suburbia, and everywhere in between. But it also means that David Lynch has been one of the most controversial directors. Several people have noted that Lynch’s last notable work was as the legendary John Ford in the final scene of Steven Spielberg’s 2022 The Fablemen; his one-scene cameo is absolutely wonderful, hilarious, and as inexplicable as the rest of Lynch’s career. Both of these make complete sense – with course, he would star in a Steven Spielberg film as one of the most famous American filmmakers to ever exist – and that makes no sense whatsoever. Such is the beauty and wonder of David Lynch.

But it also means that people couldn’t always agree on Lynch’s films, let alone which ones were the best. Head to a place like Rotten Tomatoes and you might be amazed and a little horrified to learn that, say, his 2001 masterpiece. Mulholland Drive which allowed Naomi Watts to deliver a brilliant, star-studded performance and was one of the most exciting films of the decade, doesn’t even have a 90 percent critical score. It’s a film that has rightfully taken its place as one of the greatest psychological thrillers of all time, and yet it just can’t break the 90 percent barrier. So it should come as no surprise that only two of Lynch’s films have an even higher rating of 95 percent. If you look at Lynch’s entire career and the traditional understanding of who he was as a director, one of those two films makes sense: the 1986 thriller Blue Velvet. But Another Name, a 1999 drama. “The Straight Story” might just surprise you.

In many ways, Blue Velvet resembles the prototype of David Lynch’s film, despite the fact that the 1986 film is far from his first feature film. Lynch burst onto the scene with his late 1970s avant-garde film Rubberhead, before directing the black-and-white drama The Elephant Man and the first adaptation of Frank Herbert’s The Dunes. But Blue Velvet, which begins as a visual metaphor for the vile horrors just beneath the surface of a pleasant suburban Midwestern town, is full of the same mix of imagery that can be both endearing and disturbing. The film scored a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is surprising given the fact that one of the most famous critics of all time, Roger Ebert, hated Blue Velvet and wasn’t shy about using the TV show he shared with the late Gene Siskel to rail against movie. “It made me feel sorry for the actors who worked in it and angry at the director for letting them take liberties,” Ebert wrote. in its one-star review.

But even the best critics can get it wrong from time to time, and this was that once-in-a-blue-moon notable event for Ebert (who has been more complimentary of Lynch’s other projects). Blue Velvet follows a young man who investigates a severed ear he finds in a field, which leads him down a rabbit hole of deviant behavior, noir singers and a charming man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper in one of his most iconic roles). Blue Velvet may not be as edgy as it could have been in 1986, but the mix of edgy styles that Lynch created in the film made it so distinctive and unmistakable to many critics and audiences. The film’s unique qualities earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for best director (though he lost to Oliver Stone for Platoon ) and plenty of praise from critics … just not Ebert himself. “Blue Velvet” was so distinguished by its mood; Lynch is a director whose work is often steeped in atmosphere, and he manages to effectively use the film’s mood of inexplicable, dream-like horror, perfectly balancing the obscure and banal.

Even now, more than 25 years later, David Lynch’s production of The Straight Story seems to defy logic. This was a filmmaker who proudly defied expectations in every capacity, including whether the critics liked him or not. (Actually: His previous film, the 1997 thriller Lost Highway , got really bad reviews, so Lynch launched a new marketing campaign touting bad reviews the way most studios trumpet positive reviews.) was his last movie? A literal G-rated movie from Walt Disney Pictures about an old man driving a tractor through the American Midwest. And of course, it all happens in “The Straight Story,” which also has 95 on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not the kind of film you’d expect from most directors, let alone Lynch. But now, in the year 2025 of the Lord, reconciling Lynch with the material is easier than you might think. He’s the same man who proudly delivered hilarious and cheesy weather reports from Los Angeles for years, so why not make a movie about Alvin Straight?

Based on true events, The Straight Story follows Alvin Straight’s journey as he drives his John Deere approximately 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin so he can see his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton), from whom he has been estranged for a long time. a long time. Richard Farnsworth stars as Straight in the uncompromising yet unmistakably straightforward film that Lynch has crafted. It might have been easy for anyone who saw it at first to watch and wonder when the other shoe would drop and when the movie would get weird and unpleasant and weird. But that moment never comes; “The Straight Story” is a highly effective, if quiet, film that never strays from its own course, much like Straight himself embarked on a journey in 1994. The film now has a much sadder context than when it was released in 1999, as Farnsworth was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer during filming, and took his own life the following year.

David Lynch’s filmography is full of inexplicable and mysterious; it’s part of what made him such a special, vital and beloved director. And the good news if you have either/or The Criterion Channel and Disney+ is that you can stream both Blue Velvet and The Straight Story if you’re looking for the best of his work. But Lynch had many other good deeds. Just because it didn’t have too many super high scores on aggregation sites shouldn’t put you off. Immerse yourself in Lynch’s work; he deserved attention before and he deserves it now.