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.

One of my favorite things about Jordan Peele’s movies as a whole is that they don’t fit neatly into any genre box. A big reason for this is Peele’s worldbuilding style and prowess. His films take place in worlds that are just slant of reality: normal on the surface, but with one strange, horrifying difference lurking below—quite literally, in the case of Us, and metaphorically in his debut Get Out. It’s a similar thought experiment model that underpins many episodes of Twilight Zone, and it makes sense that Peele is at the helm of that reboot.

(Note: Thar be spoilers past this point. If you haven’t seen Nope and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now.)

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.