Ultimately, Dune is a most magnificent flying machine that can't quite get off the ground. But even if it can't fly, it's certainly impressive to look at on the runway.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 16, 2024

It's a remarkable film by a remarkable talent.

| Feb 15, 2024

Dune does a good job of introducing us to another solar system, but it is full of such soap-opera dialogue and pretentious seriousness that many won't find it worth the trip.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 15, 2024

The screenplay loses itself in a confusion of supernatural imagery. Worse yet, Dune fails to develop the sense of allegiance that makes it fun for the moviegoers to pull for the forces of good over evil.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 15, 2024

Dune's special effects are undeniably four-star material. But, irreverent as it may seem, with such a proliferation of exotic creatures milling about, it struck me that the film was like nothing so much as a sapped up episode of Doctor who.

| Feb 15, 2024

The special effects are mediocre -- the miniatures look like miniatures, the sets look like sets, the matte paintings look like matte painting. And even the much dreaded sand worms are about as scary as Missouri night crawlers.

| Feb 15, 2024

Children will be daunted by the talkiness; adults will be confused by the fantasy.

| Feb 15, 2024

For all it's built in faults, Dune hits more than it misses. And in the final analysis, it's well worth seeing (and re-seeing).

| Feb 15, 2024

This is a religious movie. Dune fans are a reverential lot, and this is the celluloid house of worship for which they have waited.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 15, 2024

By remaining faithful to the book, however, Lynch chose the more difficult row to hoe. If his film is less than successful, it's because he aimed his sights too high.

| Feb 15, 2024

The actors end up with only enough time to explicate the history. There's no room for reaction or growth or wit or irony or seriousness. Worse, there's no humor at all.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 15, 2024

It all moves along like a lengthy nightmare, hypnotically grotesque, and unnerving.

| Feb 15, 2024

Lynch's screenplay has all the vivacity of a Gregorian chant. Although his direction of individual scenes is inspired, Lynch the writer sabotages Lynch the filmmaker.

| Feb 14, 2024

The film isn't entertaining, It is too deliberately paced, too enigmatic in its implications and a little too brutal and humorless in its poetry to entertain.

| Feb 14, 2024

In cramming a 500-page novel into a 140-million film, Lynch has salvaged the names and faces of Dune but lost its ideas, its social resonance, even its suspense.

| Feb 14, 2024

The movie is heavy on exposition, and the story isn't dramatized -- it's merely acted out, in a series of scenes that are like illustrations.

| Feb 14, 2024

Rather than impose his own emphasis, or, heaven forbid, a personal interpretation, Lynch is playing it safe.

| Feb 14, 2024

Considered on its own merits, the movie seems only partially formed. And if you are new to Dune mythos, you won't be confused by the film as much as you'll feel a bit stranded.

| Feb 14, 2024

Dune the planet and Dune the motion picture are equally arid. The first lacks water; the second human interest.

| Feb 14, 2024

I can't imagine that anyone who has not read Dune will be able to make any sense whatever out of the film, or that anyone who has read the book will be anything other than angry as what has been done to it.

| Feb 14, 2024