Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we have the latest film in the Mad Max franchise hitting shelves. Yes, today brings Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga home. Plus, the Criterion Collection is back with new offerings! Read on for more…
Joey’s Top Pick
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
This prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road doesn’t reach those highs, admittedly, but it’s still some spectacle from filmmaker George Miller. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga shows that the legend has still got it, action-wise, while giving Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy some real juicy roles. My review here on the site began like so:
When Mad Max: Fury Road came out, it was very much an event. The combination of action spectacle and prestige gave it a unique feel, unlike almost anything else we’d seen. For many, it was an instant classic, becoming one of the most stunning films they’d ever seen. While I very much respect that take, I’ve always had Fury Road a bit more at arm’s length. Now, I like the movie a lot, but it never quite blew me away. Part of it is that I don’t go gaga over a car chase, and the flick is one epic car chase, to be fair. So, in a way, I approached Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga at a bit more of a remove than most. While it means I was probably never going to fall in love with the film, it did mean I was less likely to be let down. Lo and behold, this is an epic work that does a ton right, even if it does somewhat overstay its welcome.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is another blistering action epic from George Miller, who continues to do this in a manner that no one else would even attempt, let alone pull off. Painting on a bigger canvas allows for more story, which in turn adds some bloat, but the highs here are very high. The sense of seeing something done for the first time isn’t there, but there’s a joy in seeing it pulled off again with aplomb. Did I love it? No. Did I like it a lot? You bet.
Boneyard
Chucky: Season Three (TV)
Game Night (4K)
Just Mercy (4K)
The People’s Joker
The Three Stooges Collection
Criterion Corner
Brief Encounters / The Long Farewell: Two Films by Kira Muratova
From The Criterion Collection: “Nobody made films like Kira Muratova. Uncompromising and uncategorizable, the Ukrainian iconoclast withstood decades of censorship to realize her singular vision in hypnotically beautiful, expressionistically heightened films that remain unique in their ability to evoke complex interior worlds. Her first two solo features, Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell, are fascinatingly fragmented portraits of women navigating work, romance, and family life with a mix of deep yearning and playful pragmatism. Long suppressed by Soviet authorities, these films became legendary—along with their maker—and they now make for a revelatory introduction to this most fearlessly original of artists.”
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The Last Emperor
From The Criterion Collection: “Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated—quite a feat for a challenging, multilayered epic directed by an Italian and starring an international cast. Yet the scope of the film was, and remains, undeniably powerful—the life of Emperor Puyi, who took the throne in 1908, at age three, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval within and without the walls of the Forbidden City. Recreating Qing-dynasty China with astonishing detail and unparalleled craftsmanship by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, The Last Emperor is also an intimate character study of one man reconciling personal responsibility and political legacy.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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