Is Denis Villeneuve the Biggest Director in Hollywood today ?

Gotta say that Prisoners is one of the best movies made for a while, but I've yet to really see anything else of his.


Interested in seeing Blade Runner 2 though.

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Villeneuve has very quickly become one of my favorite directors. For me it started with Incendies. I saw it at a film festival just after it was nominated at the Oscars. That movie blew me away, and has continued to do so on subsequent viewings. I went back and watched his previous Canadian features, and they're good, but Incendies seems next level, to me. After the international success of Incendies he started making movies in the Lower 48 with recognizable movie stars. Prisoners was his first, and while the story itself isn't anything especially revolutionary, his personal stamp of style and character infused into this thriller about abducted children is fantastic. Enemy is frickin' great. Weird and twisted and really well done. Sicario for me is similar to Prisoners in that the story doesn't offer much of anything new, but Villeneuve's filmmaking prowess makes the pretty standard material very compelling. Arrival is his first time working with a bigger budget and it is wonderfully smart and adult Sci-Fi that doesn't hit the same notes that have been played to death in that genre.

Villeneuve always gets great performances and his movies look great. I see why people are comparing him to Christopher Nolan, but for me David Fincher may be even more apt. I see some flattering parallels between their visual sensibilities, the kinds of genre material they are drawn to, and the dark stories they weave within and beyond those genres.

Denis Villeneuve is definitely on my must-see opening day and then probably go back for multiple viewings on the big screen list of filmmakers. I don't think he's made a misstep, yet. Excited to see how his career continues to develop.


If forced to rate his filmography thus far, I guess it would go...

1. Incendies
2. Enemy
3. Arrival
4. Prisoners
5. Sicario
6. Polytechnique
7. Maelstrom




As for the hyperbole of the topic title, no, he isn't the "biggest director in Hollywood".

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Hey, if he actually manages to pull of Blade Runner 2049, which judging by the trailer he has the style down flat, then we might have one of the next great directors on our hands.

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Polytechnique is his best work imo. not a big fan of him tho

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And I know his weight fluctuates, but I say Kevin Smith is still the biggest director in Hollywood.

He's probably the most sought after Director in the business right now. So yeah, I'd say so.

Nice going, Mr. New City.

He finally hit one out of the park with Dune 2, but I notice something cartoonish in Villeneuve's villains. The knock-off Tyrell in 2049 was a little over the top (randomly gutting replicants--notice the similarity to Feyd's proclivity for randomly slicing up women in Dune) and his Beast Rabban doesn't do much more than scream and chicken-neck-snap his underlings for gibing him information updates. For all his patience with pacing and painting a picture in the frame, it seems he is a bit uncertain the clarity and impact of his villains. So, they kind of have to performatively scream "I'm the bad guy!" Granted, in the books, the Harkonnen's were supposed to be the epitome of evil, but Rabban, vile and thick as he was, was not reduced to endless screaming and neck-snapping.

I wouldn’t say his villains are over the top, but definitely stereotypical. Lives, especially those that they view as lesser than their own, are meaningless to them and thus, expendable according to their whims. Nothing too deep, obviously. Sometimes we don’t require our villains to be too deep, and it’s ok if their motivations are easy to understand.

As for “finally” hitting one out of the park? He did that 15 years ago with Polytechnique.

Polytechnique is a pretty good movie, and it doesn't seem to have aged at all (if anything, it seems even more pertinent today).

But, really, anything that involves major IP has just shown DV for the hack that he is.

By the fourth time in Dune 2 where the already established ruthless bad guy killed a character in cold blood just so we could be reminded they were villains, I'm pretty sure I laughed. With Blade Runner 2049, the scene Corax is referencing is the only one I can think of which feels in the same boat as those in Dune 2, so I was okay with that. With Dune 2 though, they layered this on too thick and my reaction was "Okay, I get it." This is a minor issue for me though. I mainly just disliked the unclear character motivations of Paul and the lack of chemistry between Chalamet and Zendaya.

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Yeah, it just felt like his motivations simply changed conveniently to accommodate whatever the next plot development / action set-piece was going to be.

Referring to him as a hack is too much hyperbole, though. His Canadian films were far more personal, and that allowed his talent to shine. His films became bigger when he moved over to Hollywood, as and such, lost that personal touch with the transition to the blockbusters. His films are still, however, pretty great for me

There are directors that can make the transition to making big-budget Hollywood films without losing their personal touch or whatever it is that made their prior work unique or artistically significant.

DV is, sadly, not one of them. And believe me, nobody is sadder about that than I am.

The other scene that got me in 2049 was where he shot the Rachel-clone in the head because she failed to entice Deckard. As for Dune, Bautista, in particular, felt dumbed-down. His Rabban is more bumbling than "beast," more "terrible-toddler" than tyrant. And that must be a disappointment for him because he wants more respectable roles.

I always felt that Paul’s motives were obvious by the end of the film, and looking back, his actions (including manipulation from his mother) all lead to his true aim: getting revenge and regaining the throne.

Which makes him a much less interesting character in my view. He becomes a petty young man who grew up extremely privileged and resents anyone taking his privileged life away.

Right, but that’s a fault of the original source material, not of DV himself.

This is a sort of "post-colonial" Dune movie (e.g., all that yelling about how the Fremen should be lead by one of their own and not an outsider -- in the books, they were just looking for a messiah and didn't particularly care where he came from), so it is naturally that Paul gets a bit more shade thrown on him. In truth, the Fremen were the plague that Paul set loose on the universe. It is their Jihad, their cleansing, their religion, that resulted in the deaths of billions and the extermination of entire planets. Paul resisted his path because he couldn't find a way to turn the Fremen war-machine off (once started, the movement had a life of its own). In the books, Paul is desperate to find a way to stop or, at least, mitigate the impact of the Jihad. We see his resistance to this path in the movies, his reluctance to go south, but the universe forces his hand. Once Fremen villages are getting glassed, he's all in. Either he dies with all the Fremen or he takes the throne for himself. Remember, he was on the run, hunted on an environmentally extreme world, and he searched his prescient vision to find a narrow path of survival. That path just so happened to require that he follow it to a throne.

Herbert's take on the character was that Paul was like John F. Kennedy, dangerous because he was charismatic. He said that he liked Nixon better than JFK, because you could at least see him for what he was. With charismatic leaders, his position was that they should come with a warning label.

It's not that Paul is evil, so much as he is not really in control of himself or the forces that surround him. I would go further in detailing the metaphysical deathtrap he falls into, but that would be spoiler territory.

And I never said DV was to blame for it, personally, right? I mean maybe that's just how the character is written. It still makes him a very uninteresting character to be the protagonist of a whole trilogy of films