Wild at Heart

The movie's initial intensity is so great, it consumes itself. By the time we reach the final scene, which is clearly supposed to exude glorious rapture between offbeat lovers Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, it has all the warming effect of cold ash. Read full review

As a story, Wild at Heart is even less coherent than “Blue Velvet,'' to the point where whole characters and subplots disappear into a murky haze at the end. [17 Aug 1990, Arts, p.11]

A wacky, occasionally inventive road movie that fails to display the vision or the dark intensity of director Lynch's earlier work. Read full review

A lurid hodgepodge of the ''subversive'' and the secondhand, the movie lacks the primal pop pleasures of Lynch's best work. Read full review

The best performance, the only one that can really be called acting, is Diane Ladd's as the mother. Ladd gives us a woman full of self-pity and shrewdness, full of sexual experience and guile, who has now reached the age when, if she wants to, she can turn off sexual heat in favor of cold power drive. [24 Sept 1990, p.32]

This time, though, Mr. Lynch's conceits are less often pleasurably disorienting than out of focus. Read full review