Dune (2021)

"(An) eerily vast and awe-inspiring epic, a cathedral of interplanetary strangeness..."

"The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution... often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end."

"An awful lot of what we’re watching feels like laborious setup for a hopefully more gripping film to come..."

"Denis Villeneuve's adaptation has a majestic vastness, and most of it actually makes sense, but it's an act of world-building that runs out of storytelling steam."

"Villeneuve’s Dune is a thick, loud, well-fed spectacle of a movie..."

"For all its faults... and missed opportunities, Dune is unapologetically weirder, more interesting, and more ambitious than any of its big-budgeted peers."

"Some vexing, inscrutable mystery and preening opacity can be fun. But there ought to at least be a big, central Why animating a film."

"In the main it’s a stately film, exacting and elliptical..."

"Denis Villeneuve’s film is of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses..."

"Dune is sluggish in places... but Villeneuve’s conviction counts for a lot."

"Tremendous... pure cinematic madness."

"Not every shot registers as rapturous. Sometimes we're just looking at sand. And Chalamet remains more haircut than actor. Yet the film also has a credibly hard edge."

"Villeneuve’s seismic world-building is all tone and no melody."

"This is a technically brilliant, visually amazing movie with a top-notch cast and deep sci-fi concepts. A shame, then, that it feels like a drag in its (second half)..."

"If Part Two never happens, it’ll be a travesty."