The Dune trilogy is among my biggest influences and inspirations as a writer—and I’m certainly not alone in this. It was one of the works that helped to define space opera and science fiction as we know them today, so it’s no surprise that people keep trying to adapt it for the big screen.

Unfortunately, none of those past attempts did full justice to the source material. Not even Patrick Stewart could save the David Lynch adaptation, and while the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries hit more of the right beats, it still fell far short of the tone and epic scope of the original.

And I will say Denis Villeneuve’s two-part Dune movie isn’t perfect, either—but it gets it a lot more right than any past attempt, and has earned at least this life-long Frank Herbert reader’s seal of approval. Stretching it into two films was a smart move, giving the story the space it needs to breathe and nearly achieving the expansive, multi-threaded plot of the book.

Though I saw The Princess Bride for the first time when I was a kid, I only got around to reading the book in the last few years. The film is one of the rare movies from my childhood that stands up to repeated viewings on the basis of more than just nostalgia; I was curious how the experience of reading the book would compare.

The Princess Bride is a magical, wonderfully quirky novel, and the movie adaptation stays very true to the text in terms of plot, character, and tone. The differences between the two are subtle, but each version has its own unique strengths.