The Two Best David Lynch Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

The world of film lost one of its biggest, most unconventional names this week with the death of David Lynch at the age of 78. Lynch was one of the most singular filmmakers to have ever lived, and his is a filmography where that descriptor, “singular,” really does fit. Lynch was a one-of-a-kind director, whose work was so unique, so head-scratching, yet so compelling that he was able to create indelible image after indelible image across stories set in the worlds of science fiction, suburbia, and everywhere in between. But what that also means is that David Lynch was among the most divisive directors. A few people have noted that Lynch’s last notable piece of work was as the legendary John Ford in the final scene of Steven Spielberg’s 2022 film “The Fabelmans”; his one-scene cameo is absolutely delightful, hilarious, and kind of as inexplicable as the rest of Lynch’s career. It both makes perfect sense — of course, he would star in a Steven Spielberg film as one of the most recognized American filmmakers to ever live — and it makes no sense at all. Such is the beauty and wonder of David Lynch.

But what it also means is that people couldn’t always agree on Lynch’s films, let alone which of those films were the best. Head over to a place like Rotten Tomatoes, and you just might be gobsmacked and a bit horrified to learn that, say, his 2001 masterpiece “Mulholland Drive,” which allowed Naomi Watts to deliver a brilliant, star-making performance and was one of the most haunting films of decades, doesn’t even have a 90 percent score among critics. This is a film that rightly has held its place as one of the great psychological thrillers ever, and yet, it can’t crack the 90-percent barrier. So it should come as no surprise that just two of Lynch’s films hold an even higher rating of 95 percent. When you look at Lynch’s whole career and the traditional sense of who he was as a filmmaker, one of those two films makes sense: it’s the 1986 thriller “Blue Velvet.” But the other title, the 1999 drama “The Straight Story,” might just surprise you.

In many ways, “Blue Velvet” feels like the prototype of the David Lynch film, despite the fact the 1986 film is far from his first feature. Lynch burst onto the scene with his late-1970s avant-garde film “Eraserhead,” before making the black-and-white period drama “The Elephant Man” and the first adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” But “Blue Velvet,” which begins by indulging in a visual metaphor of the seedy horrors just below the surface of a pleasant suburban Midwestern town, is full of the same blend of imagery that could be alluring and disturbing all at once. The film has a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is kind of amazing considering the fact that one of the most well-known critics of all time, Roger Ebert, famously loathed “Blue Velvet” and was not shy in using the TV show he shared with the late Gene Siskel to serve as a bully pulpit in speaking out against the film. “It made me feel pity for the actors who worked in it and anger at the director for taking liberties with them,” Ebert wrote in his one-star review.

But even the best critics can get it wrong once in a while, and this was that notable once-in-a-blue-moon for Ebert (who was more complimentary of other Lynch projects). “Blue Velvet,” tells the story of a young man who investigates a severed ear he finds in a field, leading him down a rabbit hole of deviant behavior, noir-ish lounge singers, and a hellacious man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper in one of his most iconic roles). “Blue Velvet” is perhaps not quite as perverse-seeming now as it may have been in 1986, but the combination of jarring styles that Lynch created in the film made it so distinctive and unerring for so many critics and audiences. The film’s unique qualities netted Lynch his second Best Director Oscar nomination (although he lost to Oliver Stone for “Platoon”) and plenty of plaudits from critics … just not Ebert himself. What made “Blue Velvet” stand out so much is the mood of the film; Lynch is a director whose work is often steeped in atmosphere, and he was able to effectively harness a mood of inexplicable, dreamlike terror in the film, balancing the baffling and the banal perfectly.

Even now, more than 25 years later, that David Lynch directed “The Straight Story” seems to defy logic. Here was a filmmaker who proudly flouted expectations in every capacity, including whether or not critics liked him. (To wit: his previous film, the 1997 thriller “Lost Highway,” netted very bad reviews indeed, and to lean into that, Lynch pursued a new marketing campaign touting the bad reviews the way that most studios trumpet positive reviews.) And what was his latest film? A G-rated movie literally from Walt Disney Pictures about an old man riding on a tractor through the American Midwest. And of course, all of that is what happens in “The Straight Story,” which also has a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not the kind of film that you would expect from most filmmakers, let alone Lynch. But now, in the year of our Lord 2025, it’s easier than you might think to reconcile Lynch with the material. This is the same man who proudly delivered cheerful and banal weather reports from Los Angeles for years, so why not make a movie about Alvin Straight?

Based on a true story, “The Straight Story” depicts the journey of Alvin Straight as he takes his John Deere roughly 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin so he can see his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton), from whom he’s been estranged for a long time. Richard Farnsworth stars as Straight, in a film as uncompromising yet unerringly simple as anything Lynch had ever made. For anyone who saw it initially, it may have been easy to watch and wonder when the other shoe would drop and when the movie would get strange and off-putting and goofily weird. But that moment never comes; “The Straight Story” is a powerfully effective, if quiet film that never veers off its own course, much as Straight himself took the journey in 1994. The film has a much sadder context now than it did when it was released in 1999, as Farnsworth was ailing himself from terminal prostate cancer while filming, and ended his own life the following year. 

David Lynch’s filmography is full of the inexplicable and mysterious; it’s part of what made him such a special, vital, and beloved filmmaker. 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 just the very best of his work. But Lynch had plenty of other good work too. That he didn’t have too many super-high scores on aggregation sites shouldn’t stop you. Dive into Lynch’s work; he deserved the attention before and he still does now.