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
The producer of the Mortal Kombat 2 movie has called out critics who gave it a negative review.
At the time of writing, Mortal Kombat 2 has a score of 73% on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, and a score of 48 on Metacritic.
While this means reviews have generally been mixed, the film’s producer Todd Garner took to X to criticise those who wrote negative reviews, suggesting that some of them were written by critics who aren’t familiar with the source material.
“Some of these reviews are cracking me up,” Garner wrote. “It’s clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or any of the rules/canon of Mortal Kombat.
“One reviewer was mad that a guy ‘had a laser eye’! Why the fuck do we still allow people that don’t have any love for the genre review these movies! Baffling.”
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When questioned on this viewpoint by some followers, Garner explained that while he doesn’t have an issue with negative reviews in general, his problem is specifically reviewers who don’t appear to be familiar with Mortal Kombat.
“My comment was very squarely directed at a couple of reviewers that did not like the ‘zombies’ and the fact that there was a ‘guy with a laser eye’, etc,” he said. “Those are elements that are baked into the Mortal Kombat IP and therefore we were dead in the water going in.
“There is no way for that person to review how it functioned as a film, because they did not like the foundational elements of the IP. I just wish when something is so obviously fan leaning in its DNA, that critics would take that into consideration.”
Some of these reviews are cracking me up. It’s clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or ANY of the rules/ canon of Mortal Kombat. One reviewer was mad that a guy “had a laser eye!” Why the fuck do we still allow people that don’t have any love…
One follower then countered Garner’s complaint by arguing that he shouldn’t be criticising people who don’t know the games, when the films themselves take creative license with the IP.
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“Bro to be fair, you invented Cole Young, Arcana and couldn’t even get the simple lore of Mileena and Kitana correct,” said user Dudeguy29. “I’d say you shouldn’t be tossing any stones here.”
“Fair,” Garner replied.
Garner previously criticised the cast of the Street Fighter movie when, during The Game Awards last year, comedian Andrew Schulz – who plays Dan in the Street Fighter film – claimed that the Mortal Kombat 2 movie cast were also in attendance, before joking: “I’m just kidding, they didn’t come, they don’t care about you, they only care about money.”
The jibe didn’t go down well with Garner, who stated on X at the time: “I don’t climb over others to get ahead”. When recently asked how he felt about the cast vs cast rivalry, however, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon laughed and said he had no issue with it at all.
Mortal Kombat 2 is released in cinemas this Friday, May 8, while Street Fighter arrives later in the year on October 16.
Within the family at the center of Blue Heron, the black sheep is a blond. Fair-skinned teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is an outlier among his siblings, two jostling preteen boys and watchful, 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who are all darkly featured and take after their Hungarian parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa). Jeremy’s hair color doesn’t really matter, of course, but the contrast makes a useful shorthand for Jeremy’s otherness.
If “other” sounds inexact, that’s the point. To the frustration of his devoted but exhausted parents, there’s been no straightforward diagnosis for what ails Jeremy – for the mood swings, the “acting out.” A move at the beginning of the film to a new home is hopeful but short-lived: The mystery of Jeremy, to himself and to others, persists.
Much of Blue Heron is set over the course of one summer on Vancouver Island in the late Nineties, mirroring filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s own backstory, though the film shouldn’t be confused for straight autobiography. (Her 2020 short film, “Still Processing,” explored her family’s struggles with mental health through first-person documentary.) Still, the remarkable texture of these family scenes and how they favor Sasha’s childlike perspective – her small hands as they handle a potato peeler for the first time, the easy smiles as her mother dabs sunscreen on her face – feels intensely personal. There’s a hushed, dreamy quality to these scenes, mimicking memory itself, that plays into Blue Heron’s remarkable ability to hold two seemingly contradictory things to be true. Sasha can resent her brother and love him. Jeremy can be terrifying and in pain. A film can be whisper-quiet and still trip the wires in your brain that scream “danger.”
With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast. That makes it all the more disorienting when, at arguably the moment of highest drama, Romvari shifts to a different vantage point. Boldly, she is asking the audience to look anew at what we’ve seen: to acknowledge what we saw was not the whole picture (how could it be, from an 8-year-old’s eye line?). The effect for me – and I suspect for you too, if you’re the kind of person who likes to take a movie apart and understand how it ticks – is exhilarating.
But not entirely effective – and in this reservation I gather I’m the outlier; Blue Heron has been rapturously received at festivals and by critics. This second half (of which I’m loath to spoil the specifics) becomes at once more experimental and more documentary-like, and revolves around a muted performance stranded in the in-between of drama and docudrama. Nothing ruinous, but a hangnail nonetheless on a film that otherwise had me in its thrall.
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Blue Heron
2026, NR, 90 min. Directed by Sophy Romvari. Starring Eylul Guven, Edik Beddoes, Amy Zimmer, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Liam Serg, Preston Drabble.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
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This article appears in May 8 • 2026.
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Directed by Simon McQuoid. Starring Karl Urban, Adeline Rudolph, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin, Mehcad Brooks, Tati Gabrielle, Lewis Tan, Damon Herriman, Chin Han, Tadanobu Asano, Joe Taslim, Hiroyuki Sanada, Max Huang, Martyn Ford, Ana Thu Nguyen, Desmond Chiam, CJ. Bloomfield, Vanesa Everett, Sharon Brooks, Steven Cragg, Sophia Xu, and Ed Boon.
SYNOPSIS:
The fan favorite champions — now joined by Johnny Cage himself — are pitted against one another in the ultimate battle to defeat the dark rule of Shao Kahn that threatens the very existence of the Earthrealm and its defenders.
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Drunk in a bar while running away from his destiny of future Earthrealm Champion in returning director Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat II, a fan of the washed-up, never-kut-it-as-a-star leading man of korny action movies Johnny Cage (Karl Urban, a bizarre kasting choice, forcing him to push some of the kharacter’s goofiness into the actor’s more hard-edged style – even if one has never played the video games it is easy that something is off tonally about this performance for much of the running time) is ecstatic to meet him, only to be met with a self-deprecating teardown of his work while asserting that what audiences want today is grounded and gritty, citing John Wick as an example.
That’s true to an extent, but it doesn’t mean Mortal Kombat is fit for that path. And yet, that is half of the tone screenwriter Jeremy Slater has cooked up here for the sequel (thankfully including a tournament this time, even if these are some of the strangest rules for such a thing, without any bracketing or a number of kontestants that would kontinuously evenly split in half – think 16 to 8 to 4 and so on until a winner is determined), an overly self-serious wannabe Marvel-style attempt at an epic (take a shot whenever the heroes walk toward the screen in slow motion like a team has just been assembled) that kan’t help itself from striving for emotionality through a swelling, dramatic take on the music (komposed by Benjamin Wallfisch) and the occasional piece of exposition explaining away or showing a traumatic backstory that ie subsequently diskarded for a lengthy amount of time, never materializing into anything worth investing in.
The bulk of this misguidedness komes from the introduction of Kitana (Adeline Rudolph, a standout, making the most of looking stylish and badass while wielding dual fan-blades when it’s her time to enter the spotlight) as a young girl (Sophia Xu) with her realm tormented by Outworld’s merciless skull-masked ruler Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), assuming kontrol over the land through kombat and taking her as a daughter. It is an early setup for a payoff that does eventually kome and deliver (easily one of the better fights that don’t involve Hiroyuki Sanada’s Scorpion and Joe Taslim’s Sub-Zero that the recent movies have produced), but mostly pushes her to the side throughout the rest of the film, minimizing the impact of whatever kharacterization is intended. I can tell you that this specific final fight rules, but it would be deceitful to say that her revenge is emotionally satisfying.
That’s the glaring issue with Mortal Kombat II in a nutshell: it’s awkward and cheesy when trying to take itself seriously and embody a tone that the material doesn’t warrant, but mostly works when it’s in a more subversive, irreverently funny vibe (as in, not to spoil it, everything happening here with CJ. Bloomfield’s Baraka). Josh Lawson’s Kano is also back and excels here as a kharacter functioning as the exact kounterpoint to the aforementioned Johnny Cage statement regarding realism; he’s here to rip a new one into the demeanor and appearances of the other fighters and kharacters, good and bad, with Necromancer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman) getting the brunt of the insults and more than enough to make one wonder if the filmmakers and possibly even video game franchise creator Ed Boon (who has a cameo) hate him.
Earthrealm leader and God of Thunder, Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), is once again here keeping morale high to save the human race. Rounding out the other kontestants are some of the usual beloved faces, ranging from Ludi Lin’s fireball-throwing Dragon Warrior Liu Kang, Jessica McNamee’s no-nonsense soldier Sonya Blade alongside her half-cyborg teammate Jax (Mehcad Brooks), soul-sucker Shang Tsung (Chin Han), screeching Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), an evil possessed take on hat-blade boomerang-tossing Kung Lao (Max Huang), a loyal konfidante partner-in-training and non-biological sister of Kitana in Jade (Tati Gabrielle), with other familiar faces popping up here and there. And while it would be a stretch to say that anyone is going to become a star from these movies, it’s fair to say that they play and look the parts well enough, whether it be some fan service posing or one-liners or, most importantly, busting out trademark moves and kombos.
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As for the fights themselves, they take place across several locations (some of them feature klassic arenas such as the infamous acid pool room) that have mostly been green-screened to the Netherworld and back, kreating a frustrating contrast to the otherwise impressive fight khoreography and wirework. Of course, some of the editing is still choppy, while many of the attacks themselves often fail to land with the necessary brutal impact a film like this should instill. There is something video-gamey about them in motion that doesn’t always translate well or feel anywhere near as visceral as some of the fatalities from the games or X-ray special attacks. The fact that most of the gore here is CGI blood doesn’t help.
Still, whenever Mortal Kombat II falls into a jokey rhythm that knows all of this is ridiculous (including all the deus ex machina artifacts kharacters are looking for here), pokes fun at itself (Lord Raiden is finally mocked as looking like something out of Big Trouble in Little China), and remembers that there should be almost no downtime between kombat, it’s enjoyable enough, sometimes feeling like a representation of what these adaptations should be, although disappointingly coming nowhere close to the guilty pleasure absurdities of Paul W.S. Anderson’s first krack at this. Mortal Kombat II simply can’t shake its boneheaded desperation to be taken seriously as epic, never fully kommitting to dumb fun; the kourse-korrection is almost there.
