The lethargic plot wanders between voyeuristic disgust and smug satisfaction at the film’s broad-mindedness. Lynch never made another film as tedious and tone-deaf.

| Jan 23, 2025

Tender, wonderfully acted, and profoundly moving, The Elephant Man is a unique ray of sentimentality in David Lynch’s oeuvre.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 8, 2025

It is a great film, if great means that, seeing it once, you see it forever. Great in the manner of Chaplin's City Lights, of Griffith's Way Down East, or Cukor's David Copperfield... like them, its beauties rise out darkness, struggle and shine.

| Oct 7, 2023

The Elephant Man is a very pleasurable surprise. Though I had seen Eraserhead, which is the only other feature directed by David Lynch, and had thought him a true original, I wasn’t prepared for the strength he would bring out of understatement.

| Sep 18, 2023

Despite the grounded nature of the film, Lynch finds opportunities to infuse his trademark surreal visual imagery, as well as harrowing sequences in both a bedroom and a train station. Hurt is a marvel, though the depiction of disability has aged

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 9, 2023

Nothing is allowed to eclipse John Hurt’s superb performance.

| Mar 13, 2023

The Elephant Man is so disturbing — and so successful — because it makes you think about the privilege and oppression in a bottom-line way.

| Sep 21, 2022

This brooding take on a real-life tale is a work of potency...

| Sep 15, 2022

Lynch allows himself some sentimental moments, but only briefly, and they are earned.

| Sep 13, 2022

There is a great deal wrong with a movie that adds insult to injury by unconsciously holding back the revelation of make-up.

| Aug 16, 2022

…a daring, sensitive, troubling movie about the freak we all fear lives inside of us, and our anxieties about how the world might see us; it was a classic of the time, and it’s still a must-see film today…

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 13, 2022

Lynch has a dead-on feel for the shivery intangibles that crawl under the skin and into the subconscious.

| Nov 4, 2021

With The Elephant Man, Lynch asserts his unique brand of empathetic storytelling - one that always balances the light with the dark, the good with the evil.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 13, 2020

Following his startling debut with Eraserhead, David Lynch retained that picture's industrial imagery, unnerving sound design, and oddball atmosphere and layered them over this rich story.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 13, 2020

It's equal parts scary and sad - a Frankenstein's monster that can garner both fright and sympathy.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 6, 2020

This is by far the most conventional of David Lynch's films, and thus perhaps it is the easiest with which to demonstrate his immense skill at narrative story-telling.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jul 4, 2020

Flawless interpretation of the hit stage play about a Victorian Era gent living with a confronting physical affliction.

| Apr 17, 2020

It is an absorbing and satisfying drama, and Hurt's Merrick is very powerful.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 12, 2020

Director David Lynch does a great job, John Hurt is completely committed, and the mise-en-scène is excellent. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Aug 15, 2019

Many Lynchian tropes are here, from a sense of foreboding to a fascination with the grotesque, in terms of Merrick and outsiders' reactions to him.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 14, 2019