The Elephant Man (film) Hurt) and Best Production Design, and was nominated for four others: Direction, Screenplay, Cinematography and Editing. The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: There have been many releases of the film on VHS, Betamax, CED, LaserDisc, and DVD. The version released as part of the David Lynch "Lime Green Box" includes several interviews with John Hurt and David Lynch and a Joseph Merrick documentary. This material is also available on the exclusive treatment on the European market as part of Optimum Releasing’s "StudioCanal Collection". The film has only been released on Blu-ray Disc in the UK;
The Elephant Man (film) favorable. Roger Ebert gave it 2/4 stars, writing: "I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks." In the book "The Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture", Nadja Durbach describes the work as “much more mawkish and moralising than one would expect from the leading postmodern surrealist filmmaker” and “unashamedly sentimental”. She blamed this mawkishness on the use of Treves’s memoirs as source material. "The Elephant Man" has since been ranked among the best films of the 1980s in "Time