Denis Villeneuve
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Dune: The Perfect Deathwork June 27, 2024
The immense popularity of Denis Villeneuve’s recent two-part film adaption of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune shows that while moderns may believe they are becoming post-religious, they are in fact returning to the power behind ancient myth. As the theori...
Dune’s Dark Destinies June 07, 2024
It takes an extraordinary exercise of imagination to create a whole world, the kind of place that feels as fully delineated and described as fictional treatments of our own—more so, in some ways, since descriptions of our world can rely on common exp...
'Dune: Part Two' Elevates the Original May 08, 2024
I was too young to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy when it hit theaters a little over two decades ago. When I heard that one of Hollywood’s finest working directors, Denis Villeneuve, would shortly be adapting Dune to the big screen, I was determin...
'Dune's' Moral Unseriousness April 08, 2024
I have written about Denis Villeneuve for some years now, remarking that no other director is given so much money to waste on beautiful spectacles. This might do us honor. Villeneuve is the favored artist of the digital/AI era (Blade Runner 2049 coul...
Dune Two Little March 18, 2024
I have questions about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two.If the Fremen have lasers, why don’t they just shoot the sand harvesters and run away? Why don’t they use their sandworms until the last battle? Wouldn’t it make more sense to fight the other g...
The 'Dune' We Deserve March 15, 2024
Make way for brotherhood. Make way for man.Brotherhood was the name of a colony in Kitsap County, Washington. In 1898, a journalist named Cyrus Field Willard, enthralled by a utopian novel he’d read, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, purchased some ...
Dune: Part Two and Paul’s Struggle March 05, 2024
At a moment when words like “jihad” and “genocide” fall perpetually from the lips of pundits, professional activists, and policy makers, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two seems a rather subversive spice to sprinkle into our combustible culture. While...
A Casual Fan’s Guide to Dune: Part 2 March 05, 2024
Dune has been one of cinema’s white whales for decades. The first book in the massively popular, wonderfully heady, and deeply weird sci-fi saga arrived in 1965, under the aegis of author Frank Herbert. The novel would go on to sell more than 20 mill...
Denis Villeneuve Talks About the Road to ‘Dune 2’ March 04, 2024
You’d be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who has put together a finer body of work than Denis Villeneuve has since making his U.S. debut in 2013. From the mold-breaking thrillers of Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario to a murderers’ row of sci-fi films in...
The Sterile Spectacle of “Dune: Part Two” February 29, 2024
Having been delayed, amid the recent Hollywood strikes, from its original release date, in the fall of 2023, “Dune: Part Two” is understandably eager to get going. It’s off before we’ve even glimpsed the Warner Bros. logo, whose famous water tower is...
The New 'Dune' Will Turn Even Skeptics Into Believers February 27, 2024
Theocratic authoritarianism, colonial violence, the pitiless economics of resource extraction: These subjects are present in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, not as vague allegories gestured at between action sequences to add some thematic heft, but a...
'Dune: Part Two' Unleashes the Terrible Power of Paul February 26, 2024
David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel Dune is best described as an interesting failure. Much of the failure was Lynch’s—he didn’t really understand the source material, and he made some questionable artistic calls—bu...
