There’s nothing duller than listening to someone else describe their dreams. But David Lynch’s movies found a way to turn his into groundbreaking cinema. Reveries and night terrors aren’t all the late filmmaker explored in his work, either: in cinematic history, there have been few keener observers of white America. While he lived in and loved Los Angeles, Lynch—who died Thursday—spent much of his life in less glamorous parts of the country, and signaled a deep affection for all of them in his filmography. His cinema and TV work is shot through with the cruelty and kindness lurking in our cities and suburbs, adults and children, the fortunate and destitute.
Much like dreams, merely hearing Lynch’s work described does not compare to experiencing his movies and TV series firsthand. Unconventional to the end, the director’s filmography (plus Twin Peaks, indispensable to his oeuvre) almost always elicits strong responses, with each project re-assembling a number of core ideas, themes, and images.
As a filmmaker that so strongly associated his creative output with the subconscious, this is less a ranking of quality and more a rumination on dreaminess. Lynch was at his best when he invited us into his subconscious. He was transcendent, however, when he made room for us to graft our own onto his.
© Universal/Everett Collection
12. Dune (1984)
Notable cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Virginia Madsen, Sting
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 36%
Metacritic: 41
Notoriously the project that turned Lynch away from studio filmmaking, Dune is memorable as a fork in the road for Lynch’s career—the moment he vowed never to feel like a sellout again. Yet even with its reputation as a boondoggle for both the director and studio, Dune remains a singular sci-fi epic, making Frank Herbert’s vision of a spacefaring empire’s war over a mind-altering drug feel strange and new again.
© Samuel Goldwyn Films/Everett Collection
11. Wild at Heart (1990)
Notable cast: Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Crispin Glover
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 65%
Metacritic: 52
A raucous fairytale romance that sprawls across the American South, Wild at Heart is a raw nerve of a film, following two reckless and hard-rockin’ lovers (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) who hit the road in an attempt to escape the violence that surrounds them. More jarring than other Lynch works in its juxtaposition of real and surreal, there’s an inelegance to Wild at Heart that only underlines the despair its heroes are fleeing. But even with those jagged edges, Wild at Heart sings as Lynch’s most unrestrained film—a primal scream that doesn’t signal madness, but defies it.
© Paramount/Everett Collection
10. The Elephant Man (1980)
Notable cast: Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft