Movies directed by David Lynch
Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married, and fathered future director 'Jennifer Chambers Lynch' (qv) shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. ...
show all Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married, and fathered future director 'Jennifer Chambers Lynch' (qv) shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasably weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor 'Ben Barenholtz' (qv), it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with 'Mel Brooks (I)' (qv)), though Elephant Man, The (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series "Twin Peaks" (1990), which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series "On the Air" (1992) was less successful. He also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with regular composer 'Angelo Badalamenti' (qv). He had a much-publicised affair with 'Isabella Rossellini' (qv) in the late 1980s.
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David Lynch wrote and directed this look at two women who find themselves walking a fine line between truth and deception in the beautiful but dangerous netherworld of Hollywood. A beautiful woman (Laura Elena Harring) riding in a limousine along Los Angeles’ Mulholland Drive is targeted by a would-be shooter, but before he can pull the trigger, she is injured when her limo is hit by another car. The woman stumbles from the wreck with a head wound, and in time makes her way into an apartment with no idea of where or who she is. As it turns out, the apartment is home to an elderly woman who is out of town, and is allowing her niece Betty (Naomi Watts) to stay there; Betty is a small-town girl from Canada who wants to be an actress, and her aunt was able to arrange an audition with a film director for her. Betty befriends the injured woman, who begins calling herself “Rita” after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth. While Betty’s audition impresses a casting agent, and she catches the eye of hotshot director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), Kesher’s producers and moneymen insist with no small vehemence that he instead cast a woman named Camilla Rhodes. As Rita attempts to put the pieces of her life back together, she pulls the name Diane Selwyn from her memory; Rita thinks it could be her real name, but when she and Betty find a listing for Diane Selwyn and visit her apartment, they discover the latest victim of a mysterious killer who is eluding police detective Harry McKnight (Robert Forster). Rita’s emotional identity soon takes a left turn, and it turns out that neither woman is quite who she once appeared to be. David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as the pilot film for a television series; after the ABC television network rejected the pilot and declined to air it, the French production film StudioCanal took over the project, and Lynch reshot and re-edited the material into a theatrical feature. The resulting version of Mulholland Drive premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where David Lynch shared Best Director honors with Joel Coen.
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Frank Herbert’s mammoth cult novel, about the competition between two warring families for control of a barren planet renowned for its mind-expanding spice, is converted by director David Lynch into a dense, swirling mass of religious symbolism and mysticism. Unwieldy and confusing, it’s not as bad as it seemed on release. Lynch was, reportedly, unhappy with the final cut, but his film is visually stunning — the industrial design is truly unique — and many of the scenes are among the most memorable, and original, of the genre. Kyle MacLachlan (in his film debut) stars as the “messiah” alongside an amazing cast that includes Sean Young, Francesca Annis, Sting, Patrick Stewart and Kenneth McMillan (as the decaying, bloated Baron Harkonnen, perhaps the most repellent villain ever created).
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This is the most complete of David Lynch’s films, made before his disturbing black vision of small-town American life veered into self-parody. The dark tone is set from the opening sequence, which starts with white picket fences and cheery firemen but ends with a man suffering a stroke in his garden while insect life seethes beneath the lawn. Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan plays the young innocent who gets sucked into the bizarre sadomasochistic relationship between nightclub singer Isabella Rossellini and monstrous local crime boss Dennis Hopper. The latter resurrected his career with a crazed portrait of evil — legend has it that Hopper said “I’ve got to play Frank. Because I am Frank”. Once experienced here, listening to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams will never be the same again.
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Director David Lynch goes over the top, over people’s heads and somewhere over the psychedelic rainbow here in another ultra-violent and sleazily sexy pulp art attack. Forget the story; Lynch clearly has. Just follow convict and Elvis fan Nicolas Cage and his white trash girlfriend Laura Dern as they are pursued through the Deep South by her crazed mother’s gumshoe lover. Stuffed with the Sultan of Strange’s transfixing brand of deranged visuals, haunting weirdness and exuberant camp, it’s another hip and hypnotic rollercoaster ride through the twin peaks of pretentiousness and exhilaration.
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