1 of 5 | Anya Taylor-Joy is “Furiosa.” Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
LOS ANGELES, May 15 (UPI) —Furiosa, in theaters May 24, need not be another Mad Max: Fury Road, which was a high watermark for cinema, let alone this franchise. It would be fine to be another Thunderdome, which was also good, but Furiosa still exceeds even those measured expectations.
In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is kidnapped from the Green Place by members of Dementus’ (Chris Hemsworth) Congress of Destruction. None of the congressmen live to tell Dementus where this oasis is and Furiosa won’t talk either.
So Dementus keeps Furiosa hostage, even bringing her to The Citadel to attempt to overtake its warlord, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his army of War Boys. Much later, and now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa plots her escape and revenge against Dementus.
The Mad Max world George Miller created supports different forms of storytelling in each film. Fury Road was propulsive and bombastic while Thunderdome was more localized to one region of the wasteland, and a second that Max discovers after being exiled.
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The first sequel, The Road Warrior was more of a vehicular heist movie while the original film was more of a drama than an action movie. Closer to Thunderdome, Furiosa lives in the worlds introduced by Fury Road but it is no less epic.
Because Furiosa is a prequel to Fury Road, fans know that Furiosa ends up with Immortan Joe, shaves her head and loses her arm. Still, those events occur naturally, sometimes incidentally, and never stop the movie to point out the callbacks.
The Citadel and Immortan Joe’s harem of concubines were first seen as Fury Road plowed through them in chase scenes. Here, entire scenes get to play out in those realms.
Furiosa visits the neighboring Gastown and Bullet Farms, who provided armies for Fury Road’s chase but now are settings for plot and action. Dementus’ encampment is a new enclave of the wasteland.
The film introduces awesome new vehicles for chases between Immortan Joe and Dementus’ men, with Furiosa in the middle of it all. But, in a bittersweet irony, the longevity of the Mad Max franchise now means that the current film employs more screen work than its predecessors, which simply didn’t have that luxury.
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Perhaps Miller’s imagination finally got bigger than could be built in the real world. There is still real vehicular work, but many sequences appear to use The Volume technology to allow the filmmakers to film in front of backgrounds unfolding on a screen behind them.
Fury Road combined shots and enhanced backgrounds digitally, but a tanker chase in the middle of Furiosa is particularly glaring. It looks like they used Fury Road as the backdrop for the new movie.
Coloring the sky to look more apocalyptic is fine. Putting the sky on a screen behind actors looks far less natural.
The sequence is still full of new contraptions, like parasails and a metal claw like a full size version of a claw machine in an arcade. Miller still uses the camera dynamically in these sequences, judiciously following the assault on a tanker from all sides.
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But when it cuts to Taylor-Joy standing on a real outback road, it’s a relief to be back in the real world.
The Citadel was already a digitally enhanced set in Fury Road. Having more stationary dialogue scenes on those sets allows more time to notice the background when characters are chatting on impossibly high catwalks.
There’s still probably more vehicular work than any other Hollywood movie, just less than Mad Max films used to employ. They do drive over a dozen War Boys standing atop a tanker down the desert road.
The final chase looks like they’re really driving on sand dunes, except for closeups but that’s fair to cut to reaction shots. A shootout occurs on an outdoor set.
So these are still Mad Max action sequences created by George Miller, and designed by Guy Norris. They’re playing with more tools than used to be available, and watching War Boys fling themselves off moving vehicles to self-immolate never gets old.
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In the score, Junkie XL himself, Tom Holkenborg, employs some of the memorable cues from his Fury Road score for relevant action scenes. But elsewhere, he lets the music be subtle for this film’s dramatic attention.
The world Miller created in 1979 continues to generate worthwhile new stories and engrossing places to explore. With Furiosa as compelling as Max Rockatansky, that world grows even more vast.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
Left to right, Belgian director Zoe Wittock, French journalist Nathalie Chifflet, Belgian director/rapper Baloji, French actress Emmanuelle Beart, cinematographer Gilles Porte and writer Pascal Buron attend the Camera D’Or Jury photo call at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, on May 15, 2024. Photo by Rune Hellestad/UPI | License Photo
Long before ChatGPT was a household name, Hollywood had been making AI the villain for decades — from HAL 9000 to Skynet to Agent Smith.
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Yet the most emotionally involving spin on the terrors of tech in ages arrives not from groundbreaking sci-fi, but the smart, wonderful and tremendously funny fifth “Toy Story” movie.
That’s a surprise, since it’s a film that I really hoped would never happen. After middling “4,” which was a giant step down from the heartbreaking third, the world was more than ready for Woody and Buzz to ride off into the sunset. Woody actually did.
Well, it’s good that Tom Hanks and Tim Allen got back behind the mike, because the digital age gives Pixar’s playthings a renewed sense of purpose and atypically high stakes. Usually the gang helps a young person stay in touch with their childhood. This time, they save one in progress.
Jessie, Buzz and Woody are back in “Toy Story 5.” Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection
That’s the formative years of little Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the girl who inherited the dolls from Andy (who’s now, like, 40) in the last movie. She’s 8 years old, paralyzed by shyness and totally friendless. Desperate, Bonnie begs her parents to buy her a Lilypad, an interactive touchscreen that’s all the rage at school.
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Yes, the baddie that Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) must face this time is an alarmingly cute tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.
So, rather than humanity’s fears of artificial intelligence taking control of the nuclear arsenal or replacing us with cyborgs, director Andrew Stanton’s “5” taps into a much more immediate concern: screens rewiring kids’ minds.
The crew must face off with Lilypad, a touchscreen that kids are obsessed with. Pixar
Much like when action figure Buzz arrived, sigh, 31 years ago, the toys are mortified by the mysterious intruder and her luminescent ilk. As they look across their neighborhood, all they can see for blocks are glowing blue windows with zombie youths staring into the 10×10 void.
The end is nigh, they think. How can a cowboy, cowgirl and a space cadet compete against a reactive mini-computer that connects a lonely child to the entire planet?
But these toys aren’t ready for the dark recesses of eBay just yet. They go head to head — or plastic to plastic — with Lilypad, whom Lee gives a voice that’s both bestie and “Mean Girls.”
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One of the best additions to the “Toy Story” family since 1995 is Conan O’Brien’s Smarty Pants. Pixar
You may recall lovebirds Woody and Bo Peep went off on their own at the end of the last chapter. Of course, they find their way back, but Jessie is running things now. That’s a refreshing and appropriate switch-up. Cusack’s maternal performance is better suited to this particular adventure than Hanks’ “old buddy, old pal” delivery.
After a sleepover mishap, Jessie winds up lost at another house — her first one, it turns out — where a girl named Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) lives. And it’s there we meet perhaps the best new character in this franchise since 1995: Smarty Pants.
The real misfit toys aren’t the OG crew, we learn, but obsolete computer devices from the aughts. One is Conan O’Brien’s Smarty Pants, a hysterical, hyperactive box that teaches tykes how to use the toilet. He’s been powered down for years and therefore goes berserk when juiced up.
A phalanx of lost Buzzes is a lot of fun. Disney via AP
O’Brien is — and I’m sure he’d agree — a toy trapped in a man’s body. He’s practically typecasting. And his demented acting is so energetic and untethered, you can picture Disney security guards hauling him out of the recording studio. I mean that in a good way.
There’s also a lot of fun mined from a shipment of misplaced Buzzes. We check in on the look-alikes occasionally as they morph into a phalanx of determined Navy SEALs to eventually join Jessie and Co.
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“Five” is arguably the first new “Toy Story” film to be both watched and understood by the kids of the 1995 original’s millennial audience. That shared experience is very moving all by itself.
But, even more poignantly, who can teach these young parents this vital lesson in 21st-century child-rearing better than their own toys?
The notoriously treacherous hurdles that Hong Kong telecommunications company i-Cable used to put in front of customers looking to unsubscribe from its internet and pay-TV services throughout the 2000s and early 2010s provide the premise of this Kafkaesque comedy-drama – an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking case of raging against the system.
Marking the feature directing debut of Mak Tin-shu, best known as the Hong Kong Film Award-winning screenwriter behind crime thrillers Trivisa and Detective vs Sleuths, Dog Day Evening reveals a flair for deadpan humour that might not be immediately obvious in his past scripts.
Loosely inspired by a 2014 incident in which a knife-wielding student caused a stand-off in i-Cable’s Tsuen Wan office over a cancellation dispute, the narrative sees aspiring filmmaker Tak (Yukki Tai, The Lyricist Wannabe) go berserk inside the customer service office of Happy TV after his demand to terminate his grandmother’s TV plan invites mockery from a jaded desk agent, Ringo (Michael Ning).
《一個部門的誕生 Dog Day Evening》- 正式預告 Regular Trailer
When Tak grabs a gun dropped by an off-duty police officer (Mak Pui-tung of The Sparring Partner) trying to subdue him, the heated argument escalates into a full-blown hostage situation involving several other Happy TV employees and clients, who are all sympathetic to the young man’s contractual plight.
With the release of his 35th movie, it’s obvious that Steven Spielberg is not just a good story-teller, he’s a GREAT story-teller.
The suspenseful tale he spins this time is “Disclosure Day” about the U.S. government’s attempt to keep the truth about UFOs secret.
Sinister Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) heads WARDEX (Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction), a quasi-Defense Department agency from which cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has stolen a powerful device of alien origin along with extensive classified information and video files.
Although his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) is held hostage by Scanlon’s underlings, Daniel manages to free her and get away, igniting a manhunt.
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Supported by WARDEX’s Director of Biological Assets, paternal Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), whistleblower Daniel believes people have a right to know about the coverup, dating back to the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, paranoia and the Nixon Administration.
Meanwhile in the middle of a TV broadcast, Kansas City, Missouri, meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly begins making bizarre, guttural clicking sounds which make no sense – except to Daniel, who recognizes the alien code.
To the bewilderment of her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell’s son), Margaret can suddenly speak foreign languages – like Korean and Russian – and manipulate the minds of everyone she encounters.
What Daniel and Margaret have in common is a terrifying childhood trauma that neither wants to remember. To tell you more would ruin the film’s many white-knuckle surprises and insights about faith in a supreme deity and the philosophical essence of humanity.
Scripted by David Koepp from Steven Spielberg’s story, it revolves around a nefarious conspiracy, cloaked in sci-fi mystery, tracing back to “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of a Third Kind.” And it’s a timely topic since former President Obama said he believes aliens are real, prompting President Trump to accuse him of revealing “classified information.”
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Sure – there are some gaping plot loopholes – but cinematographer Janusz Kaminski dazzles with a high-speed train chase. Buoyed by John Williams’ throwback score – on the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Disclosure Day” is an exciting 9, playing in theaters now.
Catch up on Susan’s recent reviews:
Susan Granger
Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in Journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has appeared on radio and television as an anchorwoman and movie critic for many years. Read all her reviews at susangranger.com.
