Entertainment

Review: In 'Dune: Prophecy,' women lead and vie for power

Published

1 year ago

November 17, 2024

Review: In 'Dune: Prophecy,' women lead and vie for power

Even before Denis Villeneuve’s big-screen, two-part 2021 film introduced it to moviegoers who had missed David Lynch’s enjoyably bonkers 1984 adaptation, Frank Herbert’s “Dune” had become exploited IP.

Herbert completed six novels before his death in 1986; 17 more have been written by his son Brian and Kevin Anderson. But it was the Villeneuve film that launched the brand into the franchise-mad universe of 21st century show business, where any well-performing work of sci-fi or fantasy — and “Dune” is both — is practically required to breed a network of sequels spinoffs and merchandise (Lego Atreides Royal Ornithopter, $164.99; Funko Pop! Paul Atreides, $11.99).

If you’re not familiar with the films or the books, the new HBO series, premiering Sunday, will not do you the favor of supplying much context. It does take place 10,000 years earlier, yet in most respects, life in this far-flung network of planets seems to have changed little in 100 centuries. On either side of that temporal divide, we’re in an essentially feudal society of royal houses and hereditary emperors, clothed in the medieval trappings that have ruled science-fiction fantasy from “Flash Gordon” to “Star Wars” and beyond.

Spice, a super-duper special element that has mind-altering, mind-enhancing powers and is the key to space travel, is already the most valued substance in the universe and is at the bottom of what drives the story’s antagonisms, skulduggery and power plays. It’s “Game of Thrones,” with spaceships and sandworms.

The Sisterhood, later known as the Bene Gesserit in the “Dune” universe.

(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)

The main, and most interesting characters, not to say the star power, in this space opera are Valya Harkonnen, played by Emily Watson, and her sister Tula, played by Olivia Williams. The Harkonnens (the bad guys in “Dune,” or maybe just the worse guys) are, in this era, a disgraced house, banished to a far off, snowbound planet because great-grandpa deserted in the war against the “thinking machines.” (I do appreciate the anti-AI stance.)

In what counts as the present day — there is an earlier timeline in which young Valya is played by Jessica Barden and Tula by Emma Canning — the sisters have lifted themselves to positions of influence by way of the newish Sisterhood, later the Bene Gesserit; they’re nuns, basically, who have learned to bend minds. Such supernatural activity is accompanied by extreme close-ups of an eye, occasioning thoughts of Sauron, and sometimes an unintelligible voice that occasions thoughts of the Beastie Boys’ ”Intergalactic.”

Valya has become the Mother Superior, Tula a Reverend Mother. The two don’t agree on everything, or many things. Valya, a by-any-means-necessary, push-ahead sort, is continuing the late founder’s plan to use a “genetic archive” to implement a long-term plan to breed “better leaders” — which is to say, “leaders we can control.” (The name for this is eugenics, and it is a bad thing that imagines it’s a good one.) Tula, the more sensitive sister, reckons the human cost of their multiple machinations.

The little sisters of the Sisterhood — the novices are an appealing, heterogeneous lot when they get a little screen time — are being trained as “truthsayers,” provided to the heads of different houses to act as human lie detectors. There’s also, per the title, a prophecy, a deathbed vision by Valya’s predecessor of an apocalyptic “red dust” storm that will wipe out … something. The order, or maybe everything? Prophesies are, of course, endemic to these sorts of stories, but they are a poor basis for governance and rarely do anyone any good. Just ask Oedipus, or Macbeth.

Mark Strong plays Emperor Javicco Corrino, ruler of the “known universe,” who is busy completing the arranged marriage of his daughter, Princess Ynez (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) to a 9-year-old princeling from another house, which will earn him a dowry of rocket ships he can use to destroy the Fremen. (Ynez is also, confusingly, going off to train with the Sisterhood.) The Fremen, whose home planet is Arrakis, where Spice is mined, bedevil the miners and the troops that protect them and, as the indigenous population battling imperial usurpers, are the faction you should root for. I can’t say whether they’ll make an actual appearance in “Prophecy” — only four episodes of six were made available to review — but they’ll still be fighting this fight 10,000 years hence, when it becomes the main business of the original “Dune,” and you can catch them there.

A couple in regal dress sitting on thrones.

Attaching himself to Corrino is Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), the sole and miraculous survivor from a campaign on Arrakis — the Iraq war of “Dune” — who has gained special powers that make him dangerous to cross, like Billy Mumy sending people to the cornfield in that “Twilight Zone” episode. He’s one of those sci-fi characters whose normal Earthman name distinguishes him as a plebe among patricians. Which does not mean he’s not a horrible, fanatical person. Other male characters include Ynez’s half-brother Constantine (Josh Heuston), with whom she does drugs on the night before her wedding; the Harkonnens’ cousin Harrow (Edward Davis), who has some whale fur he’d like to sell you; and Corrino’s “swordmaster” Keiran Atreidas (Chris Mason), who fences and flirts with Ynez. Ten thousand years later, Paul Atreides will become the messianic hero of “Dune.”

Sisterhood is powerful. In a nice change from recent Earth history, women are the series’ defining force, before and behind the camera. Diane Ademu-John developed the series; Alison Schapker is its showrunner, Anna Foerster the primary director. Its many female characters — so many, good, bad and mostly in between — not only demonstrate power, but, so you don’t miss the point, talk about it. Along with the Harkonnen sisters and their young trainees, who are not shy about expressing an opinion, there are Ynez, who is no pushover, and her mother, Empress Natalya (Jodhi May), who tells her emperor husband, “There was a time when you took my views seriously and the Imperium was stronger for it.” She seems ready to make herself heard again.

The TV series is made in the image of the Villeneuve film, with downward adjustments for budget and such. In the episodes I’ve seen, the action takes place largely indoors — it’s less “Lawrence of Arrakis” than it is, you know, a premium cable show. Like the movie, whose commercial and critical success suggests people approve, it’s pokey and self-serious and almost entirely devoid of humor. There are a few lower-depths, bar-set sequences to change the mood, and some HBO-brand sex scenes that feel imported from a different known universe altogether. But as they involve characters talking about revolution — once again, it’s the Rebels vs. the Empire — they don’t exactly lighten it.

As is the case with many films in which classically trained actors are called upon to elevate genre material, “Prophecy” comes across as simultaneously grand and silly — which, after all, didn’t stop “Star Wars” from taking over the world. (Probably, it helped.). Watson and Williams, respectively aggressive and deceptively passive, attack their roles with commitment. It isn’t Shakespeare, but they play it as if it were.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Here comes “THE BRIDE!”, audacious and wild – Rue Morgue

Published

17 minutes ago

March 5, 2026

Press Room

Movie Review: Here comes “THE BRIDE!”, audacious and wild – Rue Morgue

That’s both a promise and a challenge she delivers, since what follows may rub some viewers the wrong way. Yet Gyllenhaal’s full-throttle commitment to her vision is compelling in and of itself, and she has marshalled an absolutely smashing-looking and -sounding production. The story proper begins in 1936 Chicago, which, like everything and everyplace else in the movie, has been luminously shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher and sumptuously conjured by production designer Karen Murphy. Her involvement is appropriate given that her previous credits include Bradley Cooper’s A STAR IS BORN and Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, since among other things, THE BRIDE! is a nostalgic musical. Its Frankenstein (Christian Bale), who has taken the name of his maker, is obsessed with big-screen tuners, and imagines himself in elaborate song-and-dance numbers. (Considering the reception to JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX, one must applaud the daring of Warner Bros. for greenlighting another expensive film in which a tormented protagonist has that kind of fantasy life.)

THE BRIDE! may be revisionist on many levels, but its characterization of its “monster” holds true to past screen incarnations from Karloff’s to Elordi’s: His scarred appearance masks a lonely soul who desires companionship. Frankenstein has arrived in Chicago to seek out Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), correctly believing she has the scientific know-how to create an appropriate mate for him. Rather than piece one together, Dr. Euphronious resurrects the corpse of Ida (Jessie Buckley), whose consorting with underworld types led to her brutal death. Previously chafing against the man’s world she inhabited in life, she becomes even more defiant and unruly as a revenant, apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley herself, declaiming in free-associative sentences and quoting rebellious literature.

Buckley, currently an Oscar favorite for her very different literary-inspired role in HAMNET, tears into the role of the Bride (who now goes by the name Penny) with invigorating abandon that bursts off the screen. Unsure of her identity yet overflowing with self-confident bravado, she’s the opposite of the sensitive “Frank,” but they’re united by the world that stands against them. That becomes literal when a violent incident sends them on the lam, road-tripping to New York City and beyond, on a trail inspired by the films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), Frank’s favorite song-and-dance-man star.

With THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal has made a film that’s at once her very own and a feverish homage to all sorts of cinema past and present. It’s a horror story, a lovers-on-the-run movie, a crime thriller, a musical and more, and historical fealty be damned if it makes for a good scene (as when Penny and Frank sneak into a 3D movie over a decade before such features became popular). In-references are everywhere: It might just be a coincidence that the couple’s travels take them past Fredonia, NY (cf. “Freedonia” in the Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP), but it’s certainly no accident that the former Ida is targeted by a crime boss named Lupino, referencing the actress and pioneering filmmaker whose works included noirs and women’s-issues stories. Penny’s exploits lead legions of admiring women to adopt her look and anarchic attitude, echoing the first JOKER (while a headline calls them “Twisted Sisters”), and the use of one Irving Berlin song in a Frankensteinian context immediately recalls a classic comedic take on the property.

Whether the audience should be put in mind of a spoof at a key point in a film with different goals is another matter. At times like these, Gyllenhaal’s pastiche ambitions overtake emotional investment in the story. As strong as the two lead performances are (Bale is quite moving, conveying a great deal of soul from behind his extensive prosthetics), it’s easier to feel for them in individual scenes than during the entire course of the just-over-two-hour running time. The diversions can be entertaining, to be sure, but they also result in an uncertainty of tone. The dissonance continues straight through to the end, where the filmmaker’s choice of closing-credits song once again suggests we’re not supposed to take all this too seriously.

There’s nonetheless much to admire and enjoy about THE BRIDE!, and this kind of risk-taking by a major studio is always to be encouraged (especially considering that we’ll see how long that lasts at Warner Bros. once Paramount takes it over). Beyond the terrific work by the aforementioned actors, there’s fine support from Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as detectives on Penny and Frank’s heels, with Sandy Powell’s lavish costumes and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s rich, varied score vital to fashioning this fully imagined world. Kudos also to makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey and to Chris Gallaher and Scott Stoddard, who did those honors on Frank, for their visceral, evocative work. Uneven as it may be, THE BRIDE! is also as alive! as any film you’ll likely see this year.

Entertainment

These 3 Disney movie songs, animated with sign language, are headed to Disney+

Published

2 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

These 3 Disney movie songs, animated with sign language, are headed to Disney+

New animated sequences of songs from “Encanto,” “Frozen 2” and “Moana 2” are headed to Disney+.

Disney Animation announced Wednesday that “Songs in Sign Language,” comprised of three musical numbers from recent Disney movies newly reimagined in American Sign Language, will debut April 27 in honor of National Deaf History Month.

Directed by veteran Disney animator Hyrum Osmond, “Songs in Sign Language” will feature fresh animation for “Encanto’s” chart-topper “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” “Frozen 2’s” poignant ballad “The Next Right Thing” and “Moana 2’s” anthem “Beyond.” Produced by Heather Blodget and Christina Chen, the new versions of these songs were created in collaboration with L.A.-based theater company Deaf West Theatre.

“In the majority of cases, we created entirely new animation,” Osmond said in a press statement. “There were a lot of adjustments that we had to do within the animation to be true to the original intention.”

Deaf West Theatre artistic director DJ Kurs, sign language reference choreographer Catalene Sacchetti and a group of eight performers from Deaf West worked together to craft and choreograph the ASL version of the musical numbers for “Songs in Sign Language.” The creatives focused on being true to the concepts and emotion of the songs rather than direct translations of the lyrics.

Kurs said his team jumped at the chance to collaborate and integrate ASL into “the fabric of Disney storytelling.”

“Disney stories are the universal language of childhood,” Kurs said in a statement. “The chance to bring our language into that world was a historic opportunity to reach a global audience. Working on this project was very emotional. For so long, we have known and loved the artistic medium of Disney Animation. Here, the art form was adapting to us. I hope this unlocks possibilities in the minds and hearts of Deaf children, and that this all leads to more down the road.”

Osmond, who led a team of more than 20 animators on this project, said animation was the perfect medium to showcase sign language, which he described as “one of the most beautiful ways of communication on Earth.” The director, whose father is deaf, also saw this project as an opportunity to connect with the Deaf community.

“Growing up, I never learned sign language, and that barrier prevented me from really connecting with my dad,” Osmond said. “This reimagining of Disney Animation musical numbers helps bring down barriers and allows us to connect in a special way with our audiences in the Deaf community. I’m grateful that the Studio got behind making something so impactful.”

Movie Reviews

Maxime Giroux – ‘In Cold Light’ movie review

Published

12 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

Maxime Giroux – ‘In Cold Light’ movie review

(Credits: Far Out / Elevation Pictures)

Wed 4 March 2026 9:30, UK

Maxime Giroux – ‘In Cold Light’

The action is relentless in the complex thriller In Cold Light, a tense combination of crime and fugitive tale and family drama. It is the third feature and first English language film by Maxime Giroux, best known for a very different kind of film, the critically acclaimed 2014 drama Felix & Meira.

The tension and high energy of In Cold Light almost overwhelm the film, but are relieved, barely, by moments of character development and introspection that keep the audience pulling for the restrained and outwardly cold main character.

Speaking at the film’s Canadian premiere, director Giroux admitted he found creating an action film a challenge. Part of his approach was using very minimal dialogue, especially for the central character, letting the action speak for itself, and allowing silence to intensify suspense. Giroux has said he likes the lack of dialogue and speaks highly of the importance of silence in cinema; he prefers using “physical aspects of communication” in his films.

Young Ava Bly (Maika Monroe) is a competent and businesslike drug dealer, working in partnership with her brother Tom (Jesse Irving) and a small team. As the film begins, Ava has just been released from a brief prison sentence. She is hoping to return to her former position, but her brother’s associates consider her a risk due to her recent incarceration. While she works to re-establish herself, a shocking encounter with a corrupt police officer sends Ava’s life into chaos and forces her to go on the run.

Ava’s fugitive experience introduces a new character, to whom Ava turns for help: her father, Will Bly, played by Troy Kotsur, known for his excellent performance in CODA. Their first interaction is handled in a fascinating way, as Will is deaf and the two communicate through sign language. This, of course, provides another form of the silent interaction the director prefers; he explained that much of the father-daughter interaction was rewritten with the actor in mind. Their conflict is nicely expressed through a scene in which their initial conversation is intermittently cut off by a faulty light which goes out periodically, making communication through sign momentarily impossible, nicely expressing the rift between father and daughter.

As Ava continues to evade danger, her escape becomes complicated by new information, placing her in a painful dilemma. We gradually learn more about Ava, her background, and her character through occasional flashbacks and glimpses of her dreams. The plot becomes more complex and more poignant, and gains features of a mystery as well as an action tale, as she is pressed to choose from among equally unacceptable alternatives.

The climax of her efforts to protect both herself and those close to her comes to a head as she meets with the director of a rival drug gang. Veteran actress Helen Hunt is perfect in the minor but significant role of Claire, the rival drug lord, who plays odd mind games with Ava in an intriguing psychological fencing match. It’s an unusual scene, in which Ava’s personality is made clearer, and Claire’s understated dominance and casual speech do not quite conceal the threat she represents.

The frantic pace and emotional turmoil are enhanced by the camera work, which tends to focus tightly on Ava, and by a harsh, minimal musical score that sets the tone without distracting from the action. Giroux chose to shoot the film in Super 60; he describes digital as “too perfect” for the look he was going for, and since “Ava is rough,” the film portrays her better. The director describes the entire movie as “rough,” in fact, and deliberately chose a dark, washed-out look for much of the footage, occasionally using light and colour, in the form of fireworks, lightning, or a colourful carnival, to both relieve and emphasise the darkness.

The dynamic, intense story holds the attention in spite of the lengthy, sometimes repetitive chase scenes and subdued dialogue. Ava’s predicament, and the difficult decisions she is forced to make, are made surprisingly relatable, from the initial disaster that starts the action to the surprising flash-forward that concludes the film, on as high a note as the situation could allow. Fans of action movies will definitely enjoy this one.