Every Denis Villeneuve Movie, Ranked
Since making his name with Incendies in 2010 and breaking into Hollywood with Prisoners three years later, Denis Villeneuve's career has only gone from strength to strength.
In the last decade, the four movies that the Canadian has made have brought in $1.6 billion at the global box office and racked up 28 nominations at the Academy Awards—a combination of acclaim and financial success usually reserved for the Christopher Nolans and Greta Gerwigs of this world—without compromising the dense subject matter and baroque imagery with which he made his name.
Villeneuve’s next movie, the wildly anticipated Dune Part Three, is set to close out his trilogy of Frank Herbert adaptations in December 2026, at which point the director will move over to one of the world’s most cherished franchises: 007.
With that in mind, it seems like as good a time as any to take stock of Villeneuve’s career so far. We’ve arranged the films below in ascending order, based as much on their own quality as their cultural impact and their significance within the director’s career. All are currently available to watch on streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere—use the guide below to learn more about them and how to watch them.
August 32nd on Earth is Denis Villeneuve’s first movie and in some ways his most artsy—so whether you’re a completist or simply curious to see an early example of his natural talent for image-making, it’s definitely worth seeing; just be warned, while critics at the time praised the visuals, most found the story, which focuses on a model who decides to have a baby after she survives a car crash, a bit pretentious—I’d be inclined to agree.
Surprisingly, for a director now considered one of the most important of his generation, it took Villeneuve some time to really land with audiences. August played the Cannes film festival in ‘98 (in a section that also had a late film by Ingmar Bergman) and would go on to be selected as the Canadian entry to the foreign language Oscar—but it’s still his least well remembered.
Polytechnique is Villeneuve’s third movie and really his last before breaking into the arthouse mainstream. It was also his first and still only movie directly inspired by a real event: the École massacre in 1989, where 14 women were murdered in a Montreal college. Given all that, the movie is naturally one of the director’s toughest watches, but if you’re a fan of Gus Van Sant’s similar, if superior, Elephant, you might be interested in seeing Villeneuve approach that kind of subject matter.
The movie, one of the director’s many early works that focuses on a traumatic event and its aftermath, took Villeneuve back to Cannes. This time, he was selected in Directors Fortnight amongst a remarkable selection of then up-and-coming filmmakers that included the Safdie Brothers, Xavier Dolan, and someone called Francis Ford Coppola…
Maelström is the middle act of Villeneuve’s slightly obscure early trilogy, and it’s by far the strangest of the three—so if you like the idea of a trauma movie narrated by a talking fish, it might be up your alley. The plot, another of Villeneuve’s explorations of post-traumatic moods, centres on a successful young woman who accidentally kills a Norwegian fishmonger before becoming emotionally involved with the man’s son.
The animatronic talking fish gives the movie a playful, surrealist edge that we don’t often associate with the director’s work, but still, this one doesn’t quite deserve consideration amongst his best work. With Maelström, Denis was again selected as Canada’s entry to the Oscars, and for the second time, he failed to make the final five. He wouldn’t have to face that particular disappointment again.
It’s fair to say that Enemy is Villeneuve’s marmite movie—many of the people who don’t like it really don’t like it, the people that do, really do. Let’s just say if you like movies with psychological edges, kafkaesque moods and twisting narratives (imagine a doppelganger story with a giant Louise Bourgeois spiders via the lens of David Fincher, and you have some idea), you should take to it quite easily—just don’t come in expecting any neat and tidy endings.
Loosely adapted from José Saramago’s The Double, the story follows a history professor (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who spots an identical version of himself (also, uh, played by Jake Gyllenhaal) in the background of a movie and becomes obsessed with finding out who he is.
If you like your sci-fi dense and brooding, no movie in recent years has done it quite like Dune—and if you like the director’s take on Blade Runner, or other movies of that neo-noir ilk, you’re in for a real treat. Villeneuve’s impressive and uncompromising first entry in the Dune saga is not without its flaws (and IMO, it can’t compete with the momentum of part two—more on that shortly), but it succeeds at the most important thing—feeling absolutely HUGE.
Anyone who wants to know about the difficulty of adapting Frank Herbert’s legendary novel could have asked David Lynch: the late director’s 1984 attempt has imagination to burn (plus, you know, Sting), but credit to Villeneuve for capturing the operatic expanse of Herbert’s vision.
Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel that even the most diehard fan of the original seems to at least have respect for—so if you like Ridley Scott’s classic or the similarly dark, philosophical, neo noir vibes of movies like Gattaca or The Matrix, you’ll want to witness the incredible things that Villeneuve dreams up in the daunting shadow of Scott’s original.
I remember the apprehension I felt going to see it in the IMAX on opening night—and how that all washed away as soon as I saw Dave Bautista in those tiny glasses, boiling water on a gas stove. The most important thing to nail about Blade Runner is that it’s a world where the future is already old. Villeneuve got the assignment.
If you’re ever feeling a bit underappreciated, just remember it took 17 years before Sicario confirmed Villeneuve’s place as a master of high-end genre filmmaking—and if you’re a fan of cartel stories like Narcos or crime thrillers like Heat, it’s really one of the best modern movies of either genre.
Sicario earned Villeneuve a place in the main competition in Cannes, but he was unlucky not to win an award, despite his old pal Jake Gyllenhaal serving on the jury. Not to matter, Sicario would go on to earn three craft nominations at the Oscars, securing Villeneuve’s position in the Hollywood big leagues.
Incendies is the movie that first put Villeneuve on the map, finally earning Canada a nomination for best foreign language movie and, for the director, opening the door to Hollywood. So, if you’re interested in seeing where it all really began for him, or if you like twisty, gut-wrenching art movies like Oldboy and Enter The Void, it’s one you really have to see—just don’t read too much on it beforehand.
Without giving anything away, the plot follows twin siblings returning to the Middle East—one meets the father they never knew, the other meets the brother they didn’t know they had. In the New York Times’ recent readers poll of the best movies of the century, Incendies ranked at a respectable 127th, the fourth highest of the director’s movies, just as it is in fourth place on this list. Neat.
Speaking of the NYT poll, the highest-ranked of the director’s movies was Arrival, which was voted #26 by filmmakers and as high as #20 on the readers' poll. To be totally frank, I’ve always found the movie a little mawkish to fully fall in love with (no movie needs that much Max Richter), but it’s an astonishing visual spectacle that rightfully earned comparisons to David Lean.
It’s also a marvellous adaptation of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life—and if you like thought-provoking and deeply felt science fiction, like Alex Garland’s Annihilation or the classic Meg Ryan movie Contact, it’s one I’d fully recommend.
Career-wise, Arrival is arguably still the high point for Villeneuve—a relatively non-IP movie that earned four times its budget at the international box office and went on to pick up eight nominations at the Oscars, including Villeneuve’s first for Best Director. It’s simple: no Arrival, no Blade Runner; and no Blade Runner, no Dune.
Despite its success at the box office and the Oscar nomination for cinematographer Roger Deakins, Prisoners is not the biggest or loudest Villeneuve movie. Because of that, I was torn as to how high to place it, but it’s just that kind of movie that I wouldn’t change a single thing about. It’s a mature, airtight thriller that just doesn’t come around very often these days—and I’m talking Silence of the Lambs levels of thriller perfection here.
Gyllenhaal is so consistently ripped these days, it’s strange to remember how much of a shock it was to see him in this movie. Adding those little twitches to an already tweaked-out part, the actor does some of the best work of his career. And Villeneuve was even better, toying with the audience's expectations and cranking up the tension until the very. last. breath.
