First the community’s highest-rated narrative feature of 2024, and now the recipient of two Oscars and one special award: our 2025 Most Picture winner, the most obsessively rewatched Best Picture nominee. Congratulations to Dune: Part Two, but, crucially, to you, our members who have achieved this gargantuan feat of returning to Arrakis again, and again, and again over the past year.
That feverish appreciation has propelled Villeneuve’s picture straight into our all-time top 250 highest-rated films at #53; watched by more than 2.6 million members and liked by more than one million, and counting. Among those, I’m sure, are many like Ilyes, who writes, “I usually rewatch my favourite films once a year, but I rewatch this every month.” Like Villeneuve, we’re not quite done with the desert, either.
Jeremiah Battle definitely isn’t: the 22-year-old filmmaker (and correspondent) based in New York tells me that “this movie is one that I am always thinking about.” Different places bring out different qualities: two watches on the big screen help “ingest the scope and spectacle,” while 4K Blu-ray viewing experiences allow us “to focus on the small details I may have missed in the theater.”
Battle is an emerging director in his own right, and his relationship with Dune: Part Two is one of a cinephile, no doubt, but also of something of a student. “I watched the film for the first time a couple days before I was set to make my own short film Stalemate, and I remember feeling simultaneously inspired but also extremely intimidated,” he recalls. “Inspired because I just watched one of the greatest films I had ever seen in my life, but equally I was intimidated because I thought to myself, ‘There’s no way I’ll ever make a movie as good as Dune: Part Two.’ It was a conflicting moment but ultimately one that motivated me to go out and make a movie of my own to the best of my ability.”
