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A man of my word, I took a peek but I think I have to just accept I'm not the intended audience: even for a film mainly targeted at kids, it seemed to me shallow, dumbed-down and overly-obvious. Jim Carrey was good though, and the colours are pretty.

5.8/10

I would love to read your review opinion of the latest Sonic 3 movie, please. I saw it on movie theater Cinepolis yesterday, so don't worry, you won't spoil me anything.

I'll give it a look when it's on home release. Not really a Sonic fan but I seem to remember the first one being ok, and I've heard people saying good things about the third.

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Inland Empire (2006)

The great weakness of David Lynch's final film is that it is just a little too far ahead of its time, being shot on handheld digital video, which today would not be a big deal at all, what with the massive improvements in image quality the past 20 years, but in 2005 it means it looks like a low-resolution home movie with some famous faces in it, cheap and shaky and unbeautiful. The 2022 restoration by Criterion has improved the jaggedness of the images, but there's only so much you can do with source material shot in 480p.

Shooting this way, with greatly-reduced costs and without studio interference, freed Lynch up to be even more experimental, lengthy and self-indulgent, resulting in what often seems like a 3-hour student film. But an interesting one.

Amid all the padding there are some exceptional ideas and scenes: best of all is the one around 10 minutes in, when the creepy Polish lady who says she's just moved in up the road comes to visit the big Hollywood actress, and starts to tell her an old tale that gets darker very quickly. It's an unforgettable performance by Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie, and the first thing that comes to mind when I think of this film.

There are small parts for Jeremy Irons and Harry Dean Stanton, and a number of others, like Mulholland Drive's Justin Theroux, but other than that we're mainly following Wild at Heart's Laura Dern, who here displays her best-ever acting.

The story itself is all over the place, but seems to be most to do with identity and time, and an actress losing herself in her role and ending up in madness. Or maybe its a madwoman losing herself in the dream of being an actress. There seem to be references to a past of prostitution and murder, and sins being passed down to, and punished in, others. But maybe that's just me.

The whole thing is much easier to watch at home with subtitles on than at the cinema, where I remember missing a lot of the dialogue. I'd like to see a pared-down, 100-minute edit, cutting out a good deal of the Polish scenes. But keeping the rabbits. Mostly I wish I could have seen this shot on film, as it would have been much more beautiful to watch and an easier experience to lose oneself in over such a length of time. But this was a worthy experiment Lynch made on his own time and his own dime, and I'm glad it exists.

6.4/10

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Dune (1984)

David Lynch's attempt at putting the massive sci-fi epic on screen resulted in a messy extravaganza that most audiences found incoherent, especially when aggressively cut down by the studio to theatrical length. The "Spicediver" fanedit makes for a better watch than the original and the extended "Alan Smithee" cut, but is longer and slower. None of the versions make for a satisfying cinema experience, and at best feel like Star Wars with all the fun taken out.

The Villeneuve films are technically superior and far-surpass this one in world-building, although I'd say the actors are better chosen in this. At the end of the day, all versions of the story are a long, dull slog, and there's not really any getting around that without completely rewriting the books they were made from.

5.4/10

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Twin Peak: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

As is often the case, this movie is pretty good until David Bowie turns up, about a half hour in. It gets much patchier after that.

The Twin Peaks spin-off film adds sex and more overt violence but fails to recreate the unique ambience of the TV show, which perhaps needed the limitations of that medium to create such a plausibly artificial, innocent and self-contained world.

Chris Isaak is a decent addition to the cast, for the short time he is on screen, and Lynch himself is a pleasure as the hard-of-hearing FBI director Gordon Cole, but the return to the main Laura Palmer murder just takes away from the mystery of the original show's story and unenthusiastically plays out things that were better left imagined and untold.

6/10

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Mulholland Drive (2001)

Mulholland Drive is the ultimate David Lynch film, the one in which everything he'd always tried to do before paid off: it has the logic of a dream, told through peaks of extreme emotion. More than any of his other films, this one transcends the need for ordinary story conventions through viscerally affecting filmmaking. In other words, it doesn't matter if you don't rationally understand what is happening: you feel you understand - again, like you do within a dream that, when you wake and try to relate it to someone else, you find the connecting tissue is gone: the thing that made you laugh and the thing that made you cry and the thing that made you wake screaming no longer hold any communicable meaning.

There are many theories about the plot of the film - some of them very good ones - but mostly I am happy to just experience that feeling of unmoored understanding on its own. It is reward and achievement enough.

9.9/10

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Wild at Heart (1990)

The very messy follow-up to Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: one of Nicolas Cage's most iconic performances, but in a deeply dispiriting setting, and Laura Dern's character is a little too dumb to really identify or empathize with. The pace drags terribly and the dialogue is hollow and banal to the point that an audience can reasonably conclude they are simply being made fun of. I remember watching it for the second time with a friend of mine (on her request) and she eventually stopped it around halfway through because it was getting so depressing and traumatizing. My friend was quite perplexed, as she hadn't remembered any of the ugly parts of it: "I thought it was about Nic Cage singing 'Love Me Tender'!", she said.

I suspect that's what most people are thinking of when they look back on it fondly, instead of the parts that make you feel you're going insane, and not in a fun way. I always hope its going to be better going back to it, but it's simply not a good film, so that's not something that changes with time.

5/10

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The Straight Story (1999)

David Lynch's most uneventful - one could say dullest - film, with no sex or violence or weirdness of any kind, just the simplest (true) story of an old man driving his lawnmower across country to visit his brother before he dies, encountering ordinary, simple, decent folk along the way at every turn.

When I first saw it, years ago, I found it far too bland and boring for my tastes, and couldn't understand why it was getting such high praise and awards nominations. To me it seemed a case of the Emperor's New Clothes, and that people were finding extraordinary depth in something I found hard to distinguish from any production-line, made-for-TV daytime soap.

Rewatching it again today, I can see Richard Farnsworth's lovely final performance (he died the following year) is subtly full of the impossible-to-relate wisdom and experience of age, and Sissy Spacek is also memorable as his daughter. But these still seem to me to be something the camera is picking up from those particular human beings in front of it, rather than something special in the script or direction, and everyone else is fairly wooden and amateurish.

All that withstanding, I enjoyed it much more this time around and, free from prior expectations, could simply appreciate it for what it is and the warmth and humanity it displays, which I see now the world could use a lot more of.

7/10

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Blue Velvet (1986)

This was the film that broke David Lynch into the public consciousness, and led to him being given the opportunity of making Twin Peaks, which in turn made him a household name. I can still remember seeing the trailer for it on an old VHS tape and having to try explain to my mother while still a child why such violent images were accompanying such a nice song (Bobby Vinton's 'Blue Velvet'). The best I could muster was to say that it was showing the dark underbelly of the bright, sunny, white-picket-fenced surface of small town America, and I think that might have been the first time I realized most people don't want to be disturbed or awakened by a work of art, whereas I've never really considered anything a true work of art unless it does.

By the 1990s, posters for Blue Velvet became as common on student walls as those for Betty Blue and then, a little later on, Pulp Fiction. It's hard to see just what it was that made this one the one to connect with so many people, especially when it is so disturbing and inscrutable. Unlike the earlier Dune and The Elephant Man, this one was all from the mind of Lynch, and it set the template for almost every movie he made after.

Kyle MacLachlan, who Lynch had worked with before on Dune, and would soon again on Twin Peaks, here takes his place as Lynch's greatest leading man, personifying the wholesome innocence of the small-town boy and acting as an avatar for the audience's descent into a previously hidden world of corruption and depravity.

The film made a star again out of long-forgotten Dennis Hopper, whose psychopathic "Frank" instantly became as iconic a monster as Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter, and a perfect high point of his career that he was never to surpass. He seems to embody so much more than any one character, and instead feels like everything dangerous we don't understand about the world in one specific location.

And that could be the best description of the film he is in, too, and why Blue Velvet still haunts everyone who sees it.

8.7/10

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The Best of David Lynch

Every film, ranked and rated high-to-low:

Mulholland Drive (2001) ★★★★★★★★★★

Eraserhead (1977) ★★★★★★★★½☆

Lost Highway (1997) ★★★★★★★★½☆

The Elephant Man (1980) ★★★★★★★★½☆

Blue Velvet (1986) ★★★★★★★★½☆

Twin Peaks (1990–1991) ★★★★★★★★☆☆

Wild at Heart (1990) ★★★★★★½☆☆☆

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) ★★★★★★½☆☆☆

Inland Empire (2006) ★★★★★★½☆☆☆

The Straight Story (1999) ★★★★★½☆☆☆☆

Dune (1984) ★★★★½☆☆☆☆☆

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Shocked and saddened today to hear of the death of David Lynch, at the age of 78. There was no-one like him, and no films like his films.

The key to understanding (and enjoying) them is, in my opinion, to not expect the same structure and pay-offs you would from other films, but rather to view them as cameras set up inside a dream, with the same dream-logic and inexplicable emotions and disconcerting connections. In this way they can be enjoyed as altered states, and deeply contemplated upon as such.

His first film, Eraserhead, is the perfect example of this, and is something that everyone should experience at least once in their life. The film that really got him noticed was Blue Velvet, which is still great but has dated a little more than others, and to me now seems a little tame and compromised, comparatively.

The TV series he got offered to play with because of that, Twin Peaks, many people still consider his masterpiece, and it does still stand up today because of the haunting and disturbing strangeness bubbling underneath its shiny and artificial 1980s soap opera surface. Runs out of steam before the end, though.

His best film remains Mulholland Drive, which is the one that affects me most profoundly, without really being able to say why. Lost Highway is also extremely good, and The Elephant Man, too, though that is not at all representative of his general work.

I would avoid The Straight Story, Inland Empire, Dune, and the recent revamp of Twin Peaks until you’ve watched everything else, but everything he touched was from a world and a mind all its own.

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Midnight Special (2016)

Fantastic sci-fi thriller I hadn't rewatched since it first came out, full of now-even-more-famous faces I'd forgotten were in it, such as Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver and Kirsten Dunst.

If it has any weakness, perhaps too much is left unexplained, and it could have used a bigger finish, but otherwise it's Close Encounters of The Third Kind reimagined as a modern HBO-type drama, and a textbook example of how to make an exciting, suspenseful and engrossing tale.

7.8/10

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Girls are sick of feminist girlbosses too.

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Time After Time (1979)

H.G. Wells has to pursue Jack the Ripper in his shiny new time machine to 1970s San Francisco, where he falls in love with modern woman Mary Steenburgen.

A fairly low-key (and sometimes made-for-TV-looking) production, with basically just the three main characters in play, but it's touching and funny and clever and romantic, and the time machine itself looks super cool.

8/10

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The Escape Artist (1982)

A teenage escape artist challenges the corrupt police department to keep him locked him up while he tries to solve the mystery of his father's death.

Filmed for Francis Ford Coppola's "American Zoetrope" studio, this didn't find an audience and was forgotten almost instantly, perhaps because it evades any easy-characterization: it's too gritty and grown-up to be a kids film, and too childlike to draw in a grown-up crowd.

But if taken as its own thing, it's a unique, fascinating and well-told tale, and up there with The Prestige as one of the all-time great movies about stage magic. Griffin O'Neal is world-weary way beyond his years in the title role, and Raúl Juliá is nicely nasty as his predominant adversary.

8/10

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Red One (2024)

Of all the recent "grown-up" Santa Claus action movies, like Fatman and Violent Night, I think this one must be the best, mostly because it largely leaves Santa alone, rather than warping him into a cantankerous drunk or whatever.

The humour, look and tone of the film is very much like one of the more fun Marvel movies, such as Guardians of the Galaxy or Ant-Man, with lots of shiny tech and superpowered fight scenes. It's a loud and bustly direction they've taken but it succeeds in giving an old story a new coat of paint while still imparting the Christmassy spirit.

Not a great film but well-made and likeable.

6.8/10