Eraserhead is unsettling on nearly every level. The film is so surreal as to be profoundly disorienting, but still maintains enough structure to give emotional weight to its themes.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2025

David Lynch’s stunning debut remains a weird touchstone for art cinema snobs and lovers of the surreal everywhere.

| Jan 23, 2025

Eraserhead's not a movie I'd drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars.

| Jan 23, 2025

You want bizarre? This is it. Try to imagine a story written by Franz Kafka, filmed in black and white by Ingmar Bergman, with direction by Ambrose Bierce. Here it is.

| Jan 23, 2025

Monster babies, like concentration camps, are bad subjects for jokes. Although Lynch's taste is objectionable, his directorial talent is unquestionable.

| Jan 23, 2025

Eraserhead has the tastelessness of schlock without the speed and vulgar energy that can make true schlock entertaining. But David Lynch is not without talent, and as long as we can see what he's taking off from, Eraserhead is good, malicious satire.

| Jan 23, 2025

I guess you can sell some people on anything as long as you tell them it's avant-garde.

| Jan 23, 2025

It's a tour de force of moviemaking. But how could anyone sit through it more than once?

| Jan 23, 2025

David Lynch, the 33-year-old writer/producer/director of this artful, puzzling monstrosity, has totally bypassed the time-honoured techniques and almost comforting clichés of scaring people in darkened theaters.

| Jan 23, 2025

Visually it resembles German impressionist cinema, but it operates with leaps of bitter imagination and satire that make it intellectually, as well as emotionally, hypnotic.

| Jan 23, 2025

Moviegoers who lean toward curios or who like to follow the careers of potentially important directors from the start should give this one a try. As for the 99.5 percent of the world -- don't say you weren't warned.

| Jan 23, 2025

David Lynch says he had a happy childhood and he never has nightmares, but he's turned out a movie which is the pure substance of nightmares.

| Jan 23, 2025

Despite its visual achievements, Eraserhead disappoints. Lynch has overloaded his strange, confusing film with feelings of creepiness that don't add up to much.

| Jan 22, 2025

What you have to say, like it or not, is that there's a real film-maker behind it, bold enough to use black and white with the confidence of someone who really believes in it, and to back the visuals with a sound-track that seeks to confound you.

| Jan 22, 2025

There's not much fun in this stomach-turner, which I managed to endure for about an hour before bolting for the fresh air.

| Jan 22, 2025

The imagery is indeed powerful, but the lack of conclusion makes the whole grimly ingenious film seem like a rough draft for a more coherent project. Still, it's not a film anyone will walk out of in boredom.

| Jan 22, 2025

Fantasia is a more seriously disturbing picture than the would-be shocking Eraserhead, which is simply an old-fashioned cocktail mixing of the hermetic and the emetic.

| Jan 22, 2025

Basically, if you’ve ever had a panic attack worrying that you might have knocked up your girlfriend, this is the movie playing in your head.

| Aug 4, 2023

All I know is that this film zig-zags through its story's trajectory and fails to make me look at it thinking that I have seen something that makes a modicum of sense.

| Jun 16, 2023

Confronting and nightmarish in equal parts, David Lynch's infamous first feature is a surreal masterpiece. The imagery might be iconic, but its the omnipresent industrial score that sticks with you.

| Apr 11, 2023