Denis Villeneuve’s latest is an artier — certainly moodier and less entertaining, thanks to Amy Adams’s deeply inward protagonist and a blue-gray palette designed to contrast the barren present with the fruitful past — version of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. That is, it’s an alien-landing movie in which the alien …

Director Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous, gargantuan sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 neon-noir about what happens when humanity creates its own superior. People are notoriously fragile, fickle things; if we go giving intelligence to something more durable and dependable, what do we have left to brag about? The answer, this time around: …

If David Lynch couldn’t make heads or tails of Frank Herbert’s famously unfilmable novel, what was it about Denis Villeneuve that pegged him as the visionary needed to tame the 412-page beast? Sure, he did a splendid job of piloting the equally indomitable sequel to Blade Runner, but this time …

The endless “religious” hell of the Middle East, seen in the life of a Lebanese Christian woman (Lubna Azabal) who escapes to a better existence in French Canada. Her stunned offspring uncover the story of their Mother Courage, but director Denis Villeneuve piles it on as a pyramid of rape, …

Grueling, downbeat, and ultimately indulgent thriller starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, the former a self-reliant Christian father who decides to take an investigation into his daughter's disappearance into his own (bloody, torturous) hands, the latter a twitchy Masonic cop who's handling the case. The story is heavy on symbolism …

Usually, director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners) knows how to stick the landing. Any nagging dissatisfactions are dispatched with elegance and aplomb by his directorial denoument. Not so, Sicario, his exploration of the brutal violence and moral complication surrounding the war on drugs. Critics looking to get a pull-quote on the poster …

As if in imitation of the ruthless Mexican drug cartel its heroes go after, director Stefano Sollima’s sequel decapitates, disembowels, and castrates Denis Villeneuve’s beautiful, tough, and sad 2015 original. Head: what had been a smart take on the difficulty of doing right even when you’re righteous — particularly when …