Total Film by James Mottram

An astounding spectacle, vast in scale and ambition. Prepare to have your breath snatched away.

Empire by Ben Travis

An absorbing, awe-inspiringly huge adaptation of (half of) Frank Herbert’s novel that will wow existing acolytes, and get newcomers hooked on its Spice-fuelled visions. If Part Two never happens, it’ll be a travesty.

The Guardian by Xan Brooks

Denis Villenueve’s slow-burn space opera fuses the arthouse and the multiplex to create an epic of otherworldly brilliance.

Slashfilm by Marshall Shaffer

Audiences deserve to see the conclusion of an action film so immaculately crafted and patiently paced, one that's more focused on inspiring reverent amazement through the simplicity of durable storytelling structures rather than the complexity of cinematic universe building.

Newsweek by David Ansen

It is a dark, spellbinding dream, full of murmurs and whispers, byzantine plots and messianic fevers. It finds its iconography of the future deep in the past. It's not always easy to follow, but it's even harder to get out of your system. For better and for worse, it takes more artistic chances than any major American movie around. [10 Dec 1984, p.93]

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

I’ll always love Lynch’s “Dune,” a severely compromised dream-work that (not surprising given Lynch’s own inclination) had little use for Herbert’s messaging. But Villeneuve’s movie IS “Dune.”

The Playlist by Rodrigo Pérez

Those who find Villeneuve to be a self-serious, humorless, and pretentious bore likely won’t be changing their minds anytime soon after “Dune,” but that just might be their loss. Whether Warner Bros. accepts the call to make a sequel in a climate of dismal box-office returns remains to be seen. But that’s not our concern at the moment; Dune is undeniably impressive, spellbinding, and evocatively immense, regardless.

Entertainment Weekly by Leah Greenblatt

The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.

The Atlantic by Daniel D. Snyder

While it's hardly a cohesive experience, individual scenes are brought to life with striking power.

IGN by Scott Collura

Dune is a gorgeous but imperfect epic, a technical wonder that spends too much time setting up a third act that never comes.

The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Ellis

For all its cumbersome scope (realized on a shimmeringly large scale by Lawrence of Arabia cinematographer Freddie Francis), the film remains an intensely personal epic, Lynch's uncommon emphasis on characters rather than effects lending his exposition a rather remarkable lucidity.

Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)

Lynch's third feature may have been a commercial disaster, but it gets under your skin and is marked by unforgettable images and an extraordinary soundtrack.

Film Threat by Alan Ng

The entire film seems to be the book’s narrative highlights strung together but rarely spotlights any of the themes or subtext from the book (if there are any). I don’t think this David Lynch film is Lynchian in any way. To me, Dune is a straightforward adventure with very little depth or character motivation outside the genre’s tropes.

USA Today by Brian Truitt

The sci-fi epic Dune boasts a few films’ worth of giant sandworms, amazing spaceships, cosmic armies and galactic political drama, though it essentially is only half a movie.

Empire by Ian Nathan

A most fascinating disaster of genre making.

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

Dune is a huge, hollow, imaginative and cold sci-fi epic. Visually unique and teeming with incident, David Lynch's film holds the interest due to its abundant surface attractions but won't, of its own accord, create the sort of fanaticism which has made Frank Herbert's 1965 novel one of the all-time favorites in its genre.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

This is a film that doesn’t dramatically harness the vast forces it’s gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace.

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

DUNE is visually delightful but choppy, confusing, and overloaded with exposition. Moreover, most of the thematic material that made the novel work--subtexts involving incestuous desire, capitalism vs. environmentalism, and Middle East politics--is simply missing.

Miami Herald by Bill Cosford

One has the sense before Dune is well under way that it is the kind of film that may reveal itself over several viewings -- and certainly, there seems to be $47 million worth of things to look at. But fidelity to the source can be a trap, and Lynch fell into it; his movie is big and splashy and nearly nonsensical. [14 Dec 1984, p.E1]

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

In the end, Denis Villeneuve was all too right: Your television isn’t big enough for the scope of his Dune, but that’s only because this lifeless spice opera is told on such a comically massive scale that a screen of any size would struggle to contain it.