Every Denis Villeneuve Movie, Ranked

Arriving just months after his English-language debut, Villeneuve's next thriller reunited the director with his Prisoners star Jake Gyllenhaal but was an indie production rather than a major studio release like that prior film. A loose adaptation of José Saramago's novel The Double, Enemy finds Gyllenhaal in a dual role as two very different men who happen to have identical appearances. One, a Canadian college professor, discovers the other—an actor—while watching one of his movies, and slowly grows to be obsessed with his doppelganger and their possible connections. Enemy was virtually unseen during its theatrical run (grossing just $3 million) but entertained some critics with its atmosphere of weirdness and tension, which earned Villeneuve comparisons to David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Roman Polanski.

"Does it add up to much? Not really. Not finally. But it's a suggestive puzzle-box of a picture, worth turning over in your palm." —Tim Robey, The Telegraph

Villeneuve's feature debut (which followed a short film included in the 1996 anthology Cosmos) premiered at Cannes in 1998 but never received an American theatrical release. The existential, mostly French-language dramedy follows a model (Pascale Bussières) who survives a near-fatal automobile accident and decides that she wants to have a baby. Specifically, she wants her best friend (Alexis Martin) to be the father, and she wants to conceive the baby in the Utah desert. Critics enjoyed Villeneuve's directing (especially his visual flair and work with actors) much more than his screenplay, which they found slight.

"All this is engrossing. Stylistically and visually, Villeneuve flashes his talent to draw us in. However, narratively and thematically, he seems to be cheating." —Rick Groen, The Globe and Mail

Nine years passed between the director's sophomore feature and this, his third film—a self-imposed hiatus due to Villeneuve's dissatisfaction with how his first two films turned out. That time off seems to have brought a new maturity and seriousness to the director's work. Shot in black-and-white—and released in two versions, one in French and another with English dialogue—Polytechnique dramatizes the true story of one of the darkest events in Canada's history: a 1989 mass shooting at a Montreal college that left 14 women dead and 14 more injured. Compared (in some cases, unfavorably) by many critics to Gus Van Sant's 2003 drama Elephant, Polytechnique is a quick and direct retelling of the tragic events from three viewpoints: two students plus the shooter.

"It is neither floridly melodramatic nor showily minimalist. The virtue - and also the limitation - of this movie is that it confronts senselessness and insists on remaining calm and sane." —A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Villeneuve's sophomore feature is his most surreal work: After all, it's narrated by a bloody, dying fish, and the narrative pauses periodically to follow various seemingly unrelated tangents. What plot there is in Villeneuve's own script again (like his debut feature) involves a model, an automobile accident, and an unlikely romance, while death factors heavily into Maelström's existentialist story and themes. As was the case with the director's prior film, critics admired Maelström's style much more than its story, though the film wound up dominating the Canadian film awards circuit in early 2001.

"Maelström earns its haunting, unpredictable ending, never exaggerating Evian's moral dilemma. Still, without non-stop techno or the existential overtones of a Kieślowski morality tale, Maelström is just another Winter Sleepers." —Ed Gonzalez

Villeneuve's Hollywood debut—and the first of his films that he didn't also write—is a thriller set in suburban Pennsylvania that centers on the abduction of two young girls. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the police detective who tracks down a potential suspect—only to release him upon determining his likely innocence—while Hugh Jackman plays the vengeful father of one of the missing girls who takes matters into his own hands following the suspect's release. Both critically and commercially successful, Prisoners established Villeneuve as a director to watch.

"Villeneuve has produced a masterful thriller that is also an engrossing study of a smalltown America battered by recession, fear and the unrelenting elements." —Paul MacInnes, The Guardian

Returning to screenwriting for the first time since 2010's Incendies—and writing in English for the first time—Villeneuve dared to adapt a legendary science-fiction novel that previously got the better of acclaimed directors like David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky: Frank Herbert's 1965 space war epic Dune. Scoring 33 points higher than Lynch's 1984 adaptation, Villeneuve's Dune is the first part of a two-film adaptation of Herbert's first Dune book starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, and more. Dune won a year-high six Academy Awards against 10 total nominations.

The only thing preventing this Dune from being an even greater success was Warner's misguided decision (admittedly, in the wake of the pandemic) to stream the film on HBO Max the same day as its theatrical release. The fact that it still managed to gross more than $430 million (a career high for Villeneuve) is a testament to both the director's vision and movie fans' appetite for big-screen spectacle.

"To my amazement, and to Villeneuve's credit, this new Dune is totally clear in its premise, politics, and operatic sci-fi story. It's also filled with the sort of epic grandeur of vision that Dune fans always insist makes the original text special." —Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

The concluding chapter to Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic returns much of the cast of the first film while adding Austin Butler, Christopher Walken, Florence Pugh, and more. Is it as good as the surprisingly successful Part One? In fact, it may even be better, with many critics effusively praising the film as a massive and "jaw-dropping spectacle."

Villeneuve has begun work on a screenplay for a third Dune film (which would be based on the second book in the series, Dune Messiah), but production on that potential sequel has not yet been greenlit.

"Dune: Part Two is exactly the movie Part One promised it could be, the rare sequel that not only outdoes its predecessor, but improves it in retrospect… One of the best blockbusters of the century so far." —Austen Goslin, Polygon

Villeneuve's final non-English feature was also his first film to attract international attention outside of Canada. Adapted from a 2003 play by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies is a time-jumping and often shocking political drama following two Canadian twins who head to the Middle East (to an unnamed country mired in civil war) to track down details about their mother's past following her death. Critics praised the film as a haunting modern take on a Greek tragedy, and it received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Though it isn't quite the director's highest-scoring release, some critics still consider Incendies to be Villeneuve's best film.

"Incendies vaults Denis Villeneuve to the status of serious director." —Peter Debruge, Variety

It starts like every alien invasion story you've ever read or seen but then goes someplace else entirely. Arrival, Villeneuve's first attempt at science fiction, finds him adapting an acclaimed novella ("Story of Your Life") by Ted Chiang (with a screenplay by genre specialist Eric Heisserer). Amy Adams plays a linguist mourning the death of her young daughter who finds herself in an unexpected situation: enlisted by the military to find a way to communicate with a race of mysterious aliens who have suddenly appeared in a dozen spacecraft hovering over the Earth.

It turns out that sci-fi suits him: Nominated for eight Academy Awards including Villeneuve's first Best Director nomination, Arrival was praised by nearly every reviewer and became the director's first film to gross over $200 million. And following the success of Arrival, Villeneuve would work exclusively in the sci-fi genre (so far, at least).

"Arrival is such a beautiful and thought-provoking film that it almost singlehandedly makes up for every bad aliens-coming-to-Earth film you've ever seen." —Brian Truitt, USA Today

Directing a sequel to a decades-old cult classic by another legendary filmmaker seems like a fool's errand. (It's almost as dumb an idea as trying to adapt Dune.) Yet Villeneuve did just that—successfully—in 2017 with this stylish sequel to Ridley Scott's hugely influential 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner. Returning stars Harrison Ford and Edward James Olmos from the first film but mostly centering on a new character played by Ryan Gosling, Blade Runner 2049 earned praise for its visual artistry and overall mood and collected five Oscar nominations, though, like the original Blade Runner, it was not a box office success. (One likely problem: its 163-minute runtime.) Nevertheless, the film seems likely to get a sequel ... in the form of a Prime Video television series.

"Through sheer force of filmmaking will and mediation on what it means to be self-aware, Villeneuve's towering picture still manages to inspire awe and contains profoundly beautiful moments." —Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Perhaps more famous for being the first film written by Taylor Sheridan (the future creator of Yellowstone among numerous other credits), 2015's Sicario is also Villeneuve's second major studio release. The action thriller stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro and finds an FBI agent tasked with capturing the leader of a Mexican drug cartel with the help of a CIA-trained assassin. While critics loved the film as a whole—Total Film's Matt Glasby speaks for many when he describes Sicario as "the perfect mix of cerebral and visceral thrills"—many reserved their highest praises for Villeneuve's work. Though it only grossed $85 million, the low-ish budget Sicario was still successful enough to merit at least one sequel, though Villeneuve was not involved in that project.

"The opening of Sicario unfolds at such an anxiety-inducing pitch that it seems impossible for Villeneuve to sustain it, let alone build on it, but somehow he manages to do just that. He's a master of the kind of creeping tension that coils around the audience like a snake suffocating its prey." —Scott Foundas, Variety