For Fans of George Miller

Mad Max: Fury Road was reportedly storyboarded almost entirely before a word of dialogue was written. Miller has said the film is roughly 80% visual storytelling, which is why it works with the sound off, and why it hits so hard with the sound up. The action is spatial and legible in a way most blockbuster filmmaking has given up on. You always know where everyone is, what they want, and what stands between them. That clarity is what lets the emotion through.

Babe: Pig in the City is the strangest studio film of the 1990s and, by some distance, the most misunderstood. It failed commercially on arrival but has aged into something that rewards rewatching: a genuinely anxious, Dickensian city fable with undertones of dispossession and mortality that the original never approached. Miller made a fairy tale for adults wearing a children's movie costume, and audiences didn't know what to do with it. They do now.

Before The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2), post-apocalyptic fiction had a look. After it, everything else was working in Miller's shadow. The leather, the modified vehicles, the tribal hierarchies, the horizon as the only kind of hope: these became the genre's default vocabulary. What the imitators rarely capture is the economy. Miller never over-explains the world. The backstory scrolls in a few sentences and then the film just goes, trusting that you'll catch up or you won't.

Three Thousand Years of Longing was Miller's gamble on whether an audience raised on Fury Road would follow him into a film built almost entirely from stories told across centuries. The answer was commercially no, critically complicated, and for a certain kind of viewer, thrillingly yes. It is a film about the power and limitation of narrative, made by a director who has never been anything but a storyteller working at the edge of what the form allows. It sits in his filmography like an open question.