The Legacy of Beatrix Potter

Rachel Syme Staff writer You’re reading the Goings On newsletter, a guide to what we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. So far, 2024 has been light on blockbuster films—most studios wait to release their juggernauts until late spring, so as not to distract from Oscars hoopla—but, as of March 1, Big Movies are officially back. On that day, the French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s hotly anticipated “Dune” sequel—fittingly called “ Dune: Part Two ”—hits theatres, along with a dust storm of hype and a controversial promotional popcorn bucket that is meant to evoke the toothy mouth of a deadly sandworm. (Many on social media noted that the shape has more erotic connotations; “S.N.L.” has already released a parody music video about it.) “Dune: Part Two,” which was shot in Budapest, Abu Dhabi, and Italy and reportedly cost more than a hundred and twenty million dollars to make, reunites the stars Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, and Rebecca Ferguson, but also adds some new faces: Austin Butler steps in as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a rival to Chalamet’s Paul Atreides for dominion over the desert planet Arrakis, and Florence Pugh joins the cast as an emperor’s wise daughter, Irulan. Villeneuve is not the first director to tackle Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic: the avant-garde Chilean French director Alejandro Jodorowsky tried and failed to make a version in the mid-seventies; David Lynch made a much loved, operatically campy box-office flop, in 1984. Villeneuve’s approach is notable for both its sheer ambition and its staggering visual effects. In 2021, in a review for this magazine , Anthony Lane noted that Villeneuve’s first “Dune” installment feels almost too enormous to exist within the boundaries of a movie screen. “Such power as the new film does possess is grounded in simple immensity,” Lane writes. “One’s eye is at first dazzled, then sated, and eventually tired by this pitiless inflation of scale.” “Arrival” Where did Villeneuve get his love of bigness ? A new series at Film at Lincoln Center—fittingly called “ Denis Villeneuve ” —attempts, through […]

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