Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)

Jodorowsky’s Dune is special because it turns a famously unmade movie into a roaring, life-affirming story about what imagination looks like when it refuses to behave. Frank Pavich captures Alejandro Jodorowsky in full, incandescent form—part prophet, part showman—guiding you through wild concept art, audacious casting dreams, and the creative collisions that quietly seeded decades of modern sci-fi. The vibe is giddy and contagious, like sitting at the table with geniuses as they sketch the impossible, and it’s consistently entertaining even if you’ve never read a page of Herbert. If you need tidy realism or a nuts-and-bolts production autopsy, it may feel a little starry-eyed, but if you love cinema as a medium of big swings and bigger souls, this is irresistible.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is trying to bottle the wild, inspirational energy of an unmade masterpiece, and it largely succeeds as a love letter to creative ambition and the artists who shaped modern sci-fi. The catch is that it’s more starry-eyed than skeptical: it often takes Jodorowsky’s grand claims at face value and doesn’t dig as hard as you might want into what would’ve actually worked (or failed) on screen. If you’re hoping for a balanced, investigative teardown of the project’s feasibility, this can feel like a fan rally with great anecdotes rather than tough questions. Still, the interviews are lively, the concept art and behind-the-scenes connections are genuinely fascinating, and if you enjoy film-history “what if” stories, it’s an easy recommendation.