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    Review: ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Is Still Looking for Its Voice

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    A long-gestating prequel, about the women who seek to guide a galaxy, is splashy, somber and insufficiently spicy.“Dune,” the multi-novel, multi-movie saga, is in part about the battle for a precious commodity hoovered up from a desert planet to enrich the rapacious nobility. It’s called spice.“Dune: Prophecy,” the six-episode prequel series beginning Sunday on HBO, also concerns a valuable resource hoarded by empires and processed through machinery. It’s called intellectual property.Spice is a dangerous substance, controlled through violence, but at least the universe gets something out of it. Its mind-expanding properties make hyperspace travel possible and can induce prescience in the user.I.P., on the other hand, tends to simply give us lavish, lesser copies of things we already have. “House of the Dragon” is “Game of Thrones: Blonder and Blander”; “The Rings of Power” substitutes the mystic wonder of “The Lord of the Rings” with C.G.I. and metalsmithing.“Dune: Prophecy” is set 10,000 years before Timothée and Zendaya strode the sands. Its action unfolds shortly after an uprising against “thinking machines” that enslaved humanity. But the series itself is securely in the control of the I.P. machine.Its focus is the Sisterhood, the precursor to the Bene Gesserit of the films, now overseen by the ruthless and subtle-minded Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson). A combination of deep-state apparatus and deadly yoga colony, this secretive society of female mentalists provides “truthsayers” (human lie detectors) to the ruling nobles while guiding history with a genetics program designed to breed ideal rulers. (Humankind may have faster-than-light spaceships, but the galaxy remains a patriarchy that women can influence only by stealth.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Nocebo’ Review: A Troubled Home and a Sick Mother

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      A new horror starring Eva Green has a point to make about economic exploitation but lacks a sense of surprise.Child care is treacherous work in horror movies. Babysitters are invariably stalked, like in “Halloween,” and in “The Omen, looking after Damien leads his nanny to hang herself. This trope is toyed with in “Nocebo,” a new prestige horror about a stressed-out, affluent couple, Christine (Eva Green) and Felix (Mark Strong). They take on help for their young daughter (Billie Gadsdon), who, in the first sign something is terribly awry, attends a school where the uniform includes a beret.The new nanny (Chai Fonacier), who is Filipino, enters a troubled home and immediately starts handling the family’s problems and concerns, from making dinner to treating the mysterious sickness afflicting Christine using folk healing learned in her homeland. After a telephone call delivering bad news, Christine, a children’s fashion designer, starts feeling extremely off (symptoms include perspiration and seeing scary dogs). Her husband is skeptical.This movie has plenty going for it: excellent actors (Fonacier has a knack for coiled tension), stylish camerawork by the director Lorcan Finnegan and a point to make about economic exploitation. What’s missing is any sense of surprise. The plot unfolds as straightforwardly as a perfectly fine essay for an academic journal. Every twist is telegraphed. And the scenes are so overt and schematic that they prevent the actors from adding much mess or weirdness. The closest we get is Strong’s ability to imbue his flustered dad with an absurd amount of gravitas. Even in a movie haunted by death, you need more signs of life.NoceboNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More