Timothée chalamet

The Robbie Williams biopic Better Man opened in American theaters last weekend and, as every single box office commentator predicted, it flopped, and flopped hard. A gross of just over $1 million in its opening three days — less than the Golden Globe-winning The Brutalist, which is only showing on sixty-eight screens nationwide — is utterly disastrous, all the more so because this wasn’t a $10 million indie, or even a $40 million Rocketman, but a movie that it cost $110 million to make.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films represent two of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent Hollywood history. After the failure of David Lynch’s ambitious but deeply, deeply flawed Eighties attempt at filming Frank Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi epic, the project was seen as all but impossible, being both vastly expensive and presumed to be of interest mainly to the kind of young men who prefer to watch films in their parents’ basements rather than at their local theater. It also didn’t help that the first film was released day-and-date with the HBO Max streaming service; the fact that it made more than $400 million at the box office was, under the circumstances, something of a miracle.

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 both parts of Dune comprise a complex film that defies simplistic one-to-one allegory, at times Villeneuve’s richly imagined epic places a finger on the familiar, the historical, just as it points its others toward a fiction set amongst the stars.  In the second half of this adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Paul and his mother, Jessica, have escaped the initial assault on House Atreides to shelter with Fremen insurgents, but Harkonnen death squads pursue them.

There is a strange rule in contemporary Hollywood that filmmakers ignore at their peril: biopics might be a popular dramatic form for directors, but they tend to be of little interest to audiences. In the past year alone, the likes of Napoleon, Ferrari, Maestro and Golda have all under-performed commercially, demonstrating that however accomplished the filmmaker (including the Oscar-nominated likes of Michael Mann, Ridley Scott and Bradley Cooper), it is nearly always a non-starter to attempt to persuade viewers to spend their $15 on watching someone’s life story for two hours at the cinema. Oppenheimer proved to be a rare exception — though that’s far from the only way in which Christopher Nolan is exceptional.

Film bros have long had their list of sacred-cow directors who can apparently do no wrong: Scorsese and Fincher and Nolan, of course, but also the likes of Denis Villeneuve, Paul Thomas Anderson and — as of this year — Greta Gerwig. To their number should now be added Paul King, a filmmaker whose name may be less familiar than some of his peers, but whose flair and ability to make apparently risky projects not only work but succeed admirably and hilariously was demonstrated by his two Paddington films. It is now confirmed by the critical and commercial success of his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel, Wonka, which triumphantly overcame mediocre pre-release buzz by being a marvelously sweet confection.

The hotly anticipated second cinematic take on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic Dune rolls into theaters this week. Billed as an adaptation and "not a remake" of the now infamous 1984 misfire by David Lynch, the new Dune arrives in two, two-hour-plus chapters. “Part I” is a marked upgrade from that butchered Lynch release (he lost creative control and the film was edited down to just over two hours). It's sharper, more conformable in its saga duds, and as you can imagine, the use of modern computer effects goes a long way to offset those cheesy sets and clunky models. Set some 8,000 years in the future in a galaxy far, far away, Dune, much like Star Wars (or is it Star Wars, much like Dune?