Every Denis Villeneuve Movie, Ranked From Good to Extraordinary

1.Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

• 2h 44m
• TMDB 7.6/10
• Science Fiction, Drama

The best film he has made and one of the very few sequels that improves on a classic. Ridley Scott's original was a world with a thin story inside it. Villeneuve kept the world, added a mystery with real consequences, and gave the film something the 1982 version genuinely lacked: a protagonist with an interior life you care about.

Roger Deakins finally won his Oscar for this and it is not a lifetime achievement award. The film moves through distinct colour environments, the orange dust of Las Vegas, the grey rain of Los Angeles, the white void of the Wallace offices, and each one carries meaning rather than decorating a scene.

The central idea is handled with unusual restraint. The question of whether K's memories are his own is never answered in a monologue, it is answered by a plot, and the film's most devastating moment is a purely visual one involving a hologram in the rain.

The 164-minute runtime is the honest barrier. It is a slow film and it means to be. It also has the best final twenty minutes of anything in his filmography.

Watch it if: you want the most complete piece of science fiction filmmaking of the last twenty years.

2.Arrival (2016)

• 1h 56m
• TMDB 7.6/10
• Drama, Science Fiction, Mystery

The most efficient film he has made and the best entry point to his work. Aliens land, twelve vessels, no explanation, and the world's governments have roughly a week before someone starts shooting. The film's answer to this is to hire a linguist.

It is a masterclass in withholding. The alien design is deliberately unlovely and unreadable, the heptapod language is genuinely alien in structure, and the film makes translation itself into a thriller. There is no action sequence anywhere in it.

The formal trick at the centre is the reason people love it, and unlike most twist films it is not a rug-pull. The information is presented honestly from the opening scene, you simply misread the grammar of what you are being shown, which is exactly what the film is about.

Amy Adams should have won every award available. At 116 minutes it is his second shortest major film and the one most likely to convert someone.

Watch it if: you are new to him, or you want to show someone that science fiction can be quiet and devastating.

3.Dune: Part Two (2024)

• 2h 47m
• TMDB 8.1/10
• Science Fiction, Adventure

The best pure spectacle of the decade. Everything the first film set up pays off here, and the film has the confidence to spend its enormous budget on things that are strange rather than merely large: the Harkonnen arena shot in infrared black and white, the sandworm riding sequence, an army of hundreds of thousands filmed with real extras and real dust.

The screenplay's key move is to sharpen Frank Herbert's warning rather than soften it. This is a film about how a liberation movement becomes an empire, and it is careful to shoot every triumphant moment for Paul from the point of view of someone who understands what it will cost. Chani's arc, substantially rewritten from the novel, is what makes that reading unavoidable.

It requires Dune first. Together they are 322 minutes, so plan a weekend rather than an evening.

Watch it if: you want the largest possible film that still has an argument inside it.

4.Sicario (2015)

• 2h 2m
• TMDB 7.4/10
• Action, Crime, Thriller

His nastiest film and his most morally uncomfortable. An FBI agent is seconded to a vague interagency task force operating on the US-Mexico border, and spends the film slowly realizing she is not there to participate, she is there to make the operation legal.

The border crossing sequence, a traffic jam that turns into a firefight, is one of the great set pieces of the last decade, and the night vision raid that closes the second act is shot with a coldness that makes it genuinely disturbing rather than exciting.

Johann Johannsson's score is the single most effective element. It is not music so much as a low mechanical throb that arrives before anything happens on screen, and it does more to create dread than any image in the film.

Emily Blunt's Kate is one of the few protagonists in modern thrillers who is allowed to simply lose. The film refuses to give her a victory, and that refusal is the point. Skip the sequel.

Watch it if: you want a thriller that leaves you feeling worse in a way you respect.

5.Prisoners (2013)

• 2h 33m
• TMDB 8.1/10
• Drama, Thriller, Crime

His American debut and the film that proved he could do this at scale. Two girls disappear in suburban Pennsylvania, one father takes matters into his own hands, and one detective works the case properly. The film gives both approaches roughly equal weight and refuses to endorse either.

Hugh Jackman gives the best performance of his career as a man whose competence and preparedness curdle into something monstrous over 153 minutes. Jake Gyllenhaal, playing the detective with a nervous tic and no personal life, is nearly as good.

This is also the first Villeneuve and Deakins collaboration, and the visual language is already there: rain, grey light, wide static frames, a Pennsylvania that feels like it has never been warm.

It is long and genuinely upsetting, and the final shot is one of the best endings in modern American thrillers.

Watch it if: you want a serious, punishing, superbly acted crime drama.

6.Incendies (2010)

• 2h 11m
• TMDB 8.1/10
• Drama, War, Mystery

The Quebec film that got him noticed, and still the most emotionally direct thing he has made. Twin siblings receive their late mother's will, which contains two letters and an instruction: find the father you thought was dead, and the brother you did not know existed.

It moves between present-day Canada and an unnamed Middle Eastern country during a civil war, and it builds toward a revelation so severe that the film has to simply stop and let it sit. There is no music over it and no reaction shot. The camera just waits.

It is less visually controlled than his later work and considerably rawer. Lubna Azabal's central performance is extraordinary. Be aware that the film contains sustained depictions of sectarian violence and is not an easy watch by any measure.

Watch it if: you want to see what he was doing before the budgets arrived, and you can handle heavy material.

7.Dune (2021)

• 2h 35m
• TMDB 7.8/10
• Science Fiction, Adventure

A very good film that functions largely as a first half, which is exactly what it was designed to be. The achievement is that it makes Herbert's dense political and ecological setup legible without stopping for exposition every eight minutes, which two previous adaptations failed to do.

Greig Fraser's cinematography goes in a different direction from Deakins: less contrast, more haze, everything slightly bleached. The ornithopter design, with its dragonfly wing motion, is the best piece of production design in either film.

The pacing problem is real. This is a two and a half hour film that ends more or less where the second act should begin, and watched alone it feels incomplete. Watched as the first half of a five hour whole, it works perfectly.

Watch it if: you are about to watch Part Two, which you should be.

8.Enemy (2014)

• 1h 31m
• TMDB 6.8/10
• Thriller, Mystery

The strangest film in the filmography by a very long way, and the one most likely to be dismissed on first viewing. A university lecturer spots an actor in a rented film who is physically identical to him, and becomes obsessed with tracking him down. Jake Gyllenhaal plays both.

It is shot in a sickly yellow filter, set in a Toronto that looks abandoned, and it contains imagery involving spiders that is never explained in any literal way. The film runs 91 minutes and has almost no plot.

What it does have is one of the best final shots in modern cinema, an image so abrupt and so wrong that it recontextualizes the entire film if you are willing to do the work. Whether that is profound or a stunt is genuinely arguable.

It is the least accessible thing he has made. Save it until you already like him.

Watch it if: you like films you have to argue about afterward and you do not need answers.