If you were asked to close your eyes and visualize an image from the cinematic work of David Lynch, there’s a strong possibility the mental picture you conjured is found somewhere in Blue Velvet.

| Jan 24, 2025

Lynch’s first noir is also, inevitably, his first meta-noir.

| Jan 23, 2025

At the risk of being called a sick son of a bitch, I believe it to be one of the most extraordinarily erotic and mesmerising experiences I have ever had in the cinema. Blue Velvet has the power to unsettle and disturb like nothing else.

| Jan 22, 2025

Lynch pushes audiences into places not everyone wants to go, and Blue Velvet is not a conventional good time at the movies. But it is one of the most brilliant and provocative films of the year.

| Jan 22, 2025

It's as if Fellini were suddenly taking on the punk world of '50s memorabilia. It makes no sense, but it sticks in your mind. Lynch may be brilliant, but I bet he's a little bonkers, too.

| Jan 22, 2025

Its skittish humor is a survival device to head off utter desolation. Blue Velvet is also fiercely moral, and that explains its stunning force. Only a moralist can be shocked, and shock, on such a seismic scale.

| Jan 22, 2025

Lynch's background is in painting, and that's probably why you get the feeling he's creating an abstract work up there on the screen, not dealing with objects, but moods. He's a mood painter.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 22, 2025

One of the strangest, most hypnotic American films in ages. It is, in every compelling frame, a movie directed by David Lynch, possessor of the most offbeat sensibility of any current film maker.

| Jan 22, 2025

Lynch's picture is a muddy mess, bumbling alternatively between infantile ideas, gee-whiz story telling, extreme depictions of sadomasochistic behavior and clumsy satire.

| Jan 22, 2025

The problem is that Blue Velvet doesn't even follow its own perverse rules of logic. It's a jumble of styles and scenes, none of which follows from, or builds towards, anything.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 22, 2025

If you demand that a good film offers a unique vision, that it has an enthralling story and interesting characters, and that it generates challenging ideas and full-blooded emotions, Blue Velvet has it all.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 22, 2025

Blue Velvet has just enough story for viewers to convince themselves they're watching a rational movie... Yet it’s the way this story is finally absorbed and dissolved in Lynch’s dreamlike moods that gives the film its haunting undertow.

| Jan 22, 2025

David Lynch's Blue Velvet is a sustained exercise in disorientation, and if it is not exactly the masterpiece he will make someday (if only to balance the fiasco of Dune), it is certainly startling and full of extraordinary touches.

| Jan 22, 2025

Like an unsettling dream half-remembered the next morning, Blue Velvet persists, grows, rumbles away in the subconscious.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 22, 2025

It utterly redeems Lynch from the debacle of Dune and is that rarest of Hollywood products -- a riveting, complex, layered film with a distinctive and highly vivid directorial signature.

| Jan 22, 2025

It's a love-it / hate-it proposition, but Blue Velvet is one absolute: proof that there is still intelligence and energy, however perverse, in the American movie. Watch out for Lynch. He's dangerous.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 22, 2025

There are great lessons to be learned from examining the darker side of human nature. But Lynch isn't teaching; he's exploiting the gruesomely fascinating in the same way that freaks are exploited in sideshows.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 22, 2025

As perfect and perfectly disturbing a picture as the American cinema has delivered. This masterful film taps unflinchingly into perversion and decadence in order to present wholesome enlightenment with both a challenge and a conduit.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 22, 2025

An amazing, bravura piece of film-making from the surreal mind of writer-director David Lynch.

| Jan 22, 2025

The film does what it set out to well, but that is not something everyone will appreciate.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 22, 2025