Critics reviews

Die-hard fans will be familiar with many of these stories, but there is something subtly different about hearing them in his own voice, and about the tone that he adopts here: the reflective tenor of a septuagenarian... Lynch speaks with an unusual openness about deep-seated fears and anxieties. Watching The Art Life, one is struck by the degree to which the Lynchian—linked as it is to the ever-present possibility of things falling apart—is a phobic sensibility.

What is so extraordinary about this film is that it doesn’t show Lynch as the cinephile or the movie brat or even someone with any great interest in art history. No other film-makers or artists are name-checked. It is as if Lynch was in a state of innocent primitivism, without ever knowing about anyone else doing the same thing... This film underscores his utter uniqueness.

What we get in "The Art Life" is the evolution of a psyche. We get the development of a mood...[The film] is utterly essential for his many followers. They may be surprised by how much of it makes sense.

"The Art Life" shows us a lot about Lynch’s process, just in a different medium from the one that made him famous. His paintings are terrifying. One day, he just had the sudden urge to watch them move.

When we see a photograph of Lynch's mother Edwina carrying a log, or hear him recalling how, as a young boy in Spokane, Washington, he witnessed a woman walking one evening down his suburban street, stark naked and with a bloodied mouth ("kinda like the strangest dream"), it is as if the imaginative landscapes of his future work were already being sown in the past.

Crucial for serious fans of Lynch, even if it may baffle newcomers. Since pretty much the only thing more interesting to lovers of his work is the enigmatic man behind it, there’s a lot for them to get their teeth into here.

Lynch’s elliptical story-telling mode lends the film a hypnotic quality, his measured voiceover complemented by a liberal use of slow-motion... As much as "The Art Life" is concerned to show how the past is contained in the present (and perhaps vice versa), it is also premised on the assumption that small things contain much bigger things — a tighter focus can produce an expanded vision.

Lynch's art is filled with frightening images, but there's nothing scarier in his work than a father's wrath, whether it's expressed in rape, murder, or just the silent shake of a head.

For some viewers, it will be more than they want to know, but for Lynch’s many partisans, it’s required watching... [The film] perhaps dwells a bit too much on images of Lynch puffing on a smoke and staring into the distance in artistic contemplation. This might try the patience of even die-hard Lynchians.

Anyone looking for a fun, revealing, movie-career survey á la 2016’s “De Palma” will be disappointed. “The Art Life” is fairly sober stuff and as elliptical as Lynch’s signature output... Lynch devotees should dig this respectful, offbeat portrait.

Though the film’s extensive interviews with the artist and odd (dare I say “Lynchian”?) pacing make for a very engrossing experience, hardcore fans of his films may leave frustrated as The Art Life is, as its title suggests, very much focused on Lynch’s life pre-fame (and pre-film) and his studio art... [That said,] with its vivid biographical details, characteristically offbeat humor, and ponderous sequences of studio activity, [the film] seems destined to become an essential piece of Lynchelia.

This is less a play-by-play of his film career than it is a look into Lynch’s lopsided worldview... But this cockeyed, oblique attempt to get closer to the worldview of David Lynch—one of American cinema’s finest oddities—is a compelling slice of cinephile inquiry.