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

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 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

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

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

David Lynch has made a brave attempt to cram the essential plot of this complex cult novel into a 2½ hour movie, but the result is a jumbled procession of off the wall characters.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 14, 2024

Brilliant as Lynch and his collaborators often are, one has to mine out the cinematic gems and moments of wonder and awe here -- like the precious water concealed below Arrakis' sandy surface.

| Feb 14, 2024

Dune is 140 minutes long, but it flies by. There is nothing particularly overwhelming about it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 14, 2024

Dune is the kind of fantastic tale that can transport viewers the way Herbert's book transported readers.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 14, 2024

Dune simply tries to overwhelm us with technological trickery and a constantly thunderous soundtrack. Even on the level of pure spectacle, Dune is disappointing.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 13, 2024

David Lynch doesn't direct movies; he dreams them, and this one, the long awaited adaptation of Frank Herbert's pop classic, is a dark and troubling nightmare, whose messianic mysticism is neither pretty nor palatable.

| Feb 13, 2024

Dune is an incredibly pompous movie, full up with the notion that expressionless actors denote high seriousness, and that music cropped from the Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack somehow suggests the presence of class.

| Feb 13, 2024

Perhaps the worst sin of this slow, solemn melange {sic) of pseudo-religious twaddle is that it rarely shows any awareness of its own silliness.

| Feb 13, 2024

Everything in such a costly looking saga as Dune... feels marginal as the film shoots off into spectacular tangents just when we believe we may be getting its drift, detail tends to be distracting.

| May 4, 2022

For all my half-hearted hedging, I can see Lynch's Dune lasting the repertory course a lot longer than Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings or Fred Haines' Steppenwolf.

| May 4, 2022

Even if the plot has a serpentine complexity, the visual Impact of David Lynch s direction is never less than dazzling.

| May 2, 2022

No matter how hard it tries to make Herbert understandable to those who find the saga resistible, or even to make Dune hang together for devoted fans, there is an overwhelming sense that this is familiar cinematic territory.

| Oct 21, 2021

This is a film that doesn't dramatically harness the vast forces it's gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 24, 2021

The convoluted narrative ultimately slips away from Lynch and in that failure lives the suspicion that Frank Herbert's novel is beyond adaptation.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 24, 2021

I don't believe in guilty pleasures or 'so bad they're good' movies, but Dune challenged that philosophy more than any movie I can think of. So bizarre, twisted and perplexing ... that I appreciated its conviction and ambition.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 3, 2020