The film world lost one of its biggest, most unconventional names this week the death of David Lynch at the age of 78. Lynch was one of the most unique filmmakers to ever live, and his is a filmography where that descriptor, "unique," truly fits. Lynch was a unique director whose work was so unique, so painstaking, yet so compelling that he could create indelible image after indelible image through stories set in the worlds of science fiction, suburbia, and everywhere in between. But what it also means is that David Lynch was among the most divisive directors. Several people noted that Lynch's last significant work was as the legendary John Ford in the final scene of Steven Spielberg's 2022 film The Fabelmans; his one-scene cameo is as absolutely wonderful, funny and inexplicable as the rest of Lynch's career. Both make perfect sense - the course, he's going to star in a Steven Spielberg movie as one of the most famous American filmmakers who ever lived—and it makes no sense. Such is the beauty and wonder of David Lynch.

But what it also means is that people couldn't always agree on Lynch's films, let alone which of those films were the best. Head to a place like Rotten Tomatoes, and you might be amazed and a little horrified to learn that, say, his 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive, which allowed Naomi Watts to deliver a brilliant, star-making performance and was one of the most haunting films in decades, doesn't even have a 90 percent score with critics. This is a film that rightly holds its place as one of the greatest psychological thrillers of all time, and yet, it can't break the 90 percent barrier. So it should come as no surprise that only two of Lynch's films have an even higher rating than 95 percent. When you look at Lynch's entire career and the traditional sense of who he is as a filmmaker, one of those two films makes sense: It's the 1986 thriller Blue Velvet. But the other title, the 1999 drama The Straight Story, might just surprise you.

In many ways, Blue Velvet feels like a prototypical David Lynch film, despite the fact that the 1986 film is far from his first feature. Lynch burst onto the scene with his late 1970s avant-garde film Eraserhead, before making the black-and-white period drama The Elephant Man and the first adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. But "Blue Velvet," which begins by indulging in a visual metaphor for the dire horrors just beneath the surface of a pleasant Midwestern suburban town, is full of the same mix of images that can be alluring and unsettling all at once. The film has a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty amazing considering the fact that one of the most famous critics of all time, Roger Ebert, famously hated Blue Velvet and wasn't shy about using the TV show that shared it. with the late Gene Siskel to serve as a bully's mouthpiece in speaking out against the film. "It made me feel sorry for the actors who worked in it and angry at the director for getting away with them," Ebert wrote. in his one-star review.

But even the best critics can get it wrong every now and then, and this was a notable "once in a blue moon" for Ebert (who was more complimentary about Lynch's other projects). Blue Velvet tells the story of a young man who investigates a severed ear he finds in a field, which leads him down a rabbit hole of deviant behavior, noir living room singers and a flawless man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper in a his most famous roles). Blue Velvet may not be as perverse now as it might have been in 1986, but the combination of terrifying styles Lynch created in the film made it so distinctive and unmistakable to so many critics and audiences. The film's unique qualities earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for best director (though he lost to Oliver Stone for "Platoon") and much praise from critics... just not Ebert himself. What sets Blue Velvet so much apart is the mood of the film; Lynch is a director whose work is often steeped in atmosphere, and he was able to effectively use the film's mood of inexplicable, dreamlike terror, balancing the confusing and banal perfectly.

Even now, more than 25 years later, when David Lynch directed The Straight Story it seems to defy logic. Here is a filmmaker who has proudly defied expectations in every capacity, including whether critics like him or not. (Witness: His previous film, the 1997 thriller "Lost Highway," did get very bad reviews, and to capitalize on that, Lynch went ahead with a new marketing campaign that played up the bad reviews the way most studios rave reviews.) And what was his last film? A literally G-rated movie from Walt Disney Pictures about an old man riding a tractor across the American Midwest. And, of course, it all happens in The Straight Story, which also there is a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes. It's not the kind of film you'd expect from most filmmakers, let alone Lynch. But now, in the year of our Lord 2025, it's easier than you think to reconcile Lynch with the material. This is the same guy who proudly delivered hilarious and corny weather reports from Los Angeles for years, so why not make an Alvin Straight movie?

Based on a true story, The Straight Story follows the journey of Alvin Straight as he drives his John Deere some 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin so he can see his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton), from whom he is estranged. a long time. Richard Farnsworth stars as Straight, in a film as uncompromising yet unmistakably simple as anything Lynch has ever made. For anyone who saw it initially, it might have been easy to watch and wonder when the other shoe would drop and the movie would get weird and obscene and stupid weird. But that moment never comes; The Straight Story is a powerfully effective, if quiet, film that never strays from its path, just as Straight himself traveled in 1994. The film has a much sadder context now than when it was released in 1999, as Farnsworth contracted terminal prostate cancer during filming and took his own life the following year.

David Lynch's filmography is full of the inexplicable and mysterious; it's part of what made him such a special, vital and beloved filmmaker. And the good news, if you have either/or The Criterion Channel and Disney+, is that you can stream both Blue Velvet and The Straight Story if you're looking for the best of his work. But Lynch also had many other good works. That it didn't have too many super high scores on the collecting sites shouldn't stop you. Dive into Lynch's work; it deserved the attention before and it deserves it now.