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

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

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

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

It is harrowing, repulsive, accursed, probably clinically deranged, absolutely limned with genius. It is quite extraordinary.

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

Lynch drags us into a netherworld of darkness, perversion and ugliness, snuffing with brutality whatever intellectual interest we might have in his premise. He insists on rubbing our noses in the stench long past when his point is made.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Jan 22, 2025

Blue Velvet is bruising, but it's fascinating -- a bizarre thriller, deliriously erotic, perversely funny, appallingly cruel.

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

The final brilliant twist of this extraordinary film is to show us, not just strangeness of what surrounds normal life, but the strangeness of normal life itself.

| Jan 22, 2025

Blue Velvet is extraordinary, an accomplished exercise in voyeurism which peels back the genteel layers of a nice, refined community to the dirty, turbulent, dark soul beneath.

| Jan 22, 2025

The combination of sexual primitivism and art-world knowingness brings its own kind of heavy depression. Blue Velvet is a work of art, but it’s not an exhilarating experience.

| Jan 22, 2025

Surely, this is one of the strangest and visually repellent big-budget films ever made. And yet, some scenes are almost literally unforgettable.

| Jan 22, 2025

It gets into areas of dread and shock and torment that are so profoundly dislocating and dreamlike that, watching it, you feel as if you're coiled right up inside the vision of an artist with a live feed to the unconscious.

| Jan 22, 2025

There is no disputing that Blue Velvet is a well-made film, despite some carelessness in the tangled plot. It has a style and wit that some audiences will be happy to mistake for art.

| Jan 22, 2025

Extremes have been reached here. Blue Velvet, to put it plainly, is probably the weirdest most audacious English-language movie ever released into the American mainstream -- although it has not been so much released as let loose.

| Jan 22, 2025

It's perversely original, because Lynch has no use for good taste. He's a sophisticated bull in the china shop of film, using the horror genre here to show us something awfully real.

| Jan 22, 2025

The acting's grand, all right; too bad the characters aren't.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 21, 2025

Love it or hate it, see it you must.

| Apr 9, 2020