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Mad Max: Fury Road’s teaser trailer is drenched in blood and fire

Mad Max: Fury Road‘s official theatrical teaser trailer has been released, and it is just as over-the-top as you might hope. Enjoy two and a half minutes of explosions, tricked-out car chases, and lunatics in bondage gear.

Mad Max: Fury Road is scheduled to arrive in theaters on May 15, 2015. Starring Tom Hardy as Max and Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, the film is set sometime between the events of the first and second films. The Mad Max franchise has defined the post-apocalyptic aesthetic for decades, spawning countless imitations and references across film, television, comics, and games.

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Will Fulton
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…
The best action sequels of all time
oscars vfx mad max fury road feat

Making an action movie is hard enough. Coming up with great fight choreography, unusual stunts, or other ways to wow an audience is always a challenge. Making a great action sequel is even harder, in part because it's difficult to avoid just doing whatever it was that made the first movie a success.

Each of the sequels on this list ups the stakes of its predecessor in fundamental ways. The action is better, the plots are tighter, and everything leaves you just a little bit closer to the edge of your seat than you were the first time. These are the best action sequels ever made.

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From talking pigs to hot genies: the bold return of George Miller
George Miller stands in front of a Mad Max poster.

Seven years have passed since George Miller reinvigorated the action genre with the breathtaking world-building and chase sequences of Mad Max: Fury Road. After much anticipation, the Australian mastermind behind the blockbuster franchise has finally returned, and it is fair to say his latest work is somewhat out of left field.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is not the long-awaited fifth entry in the Mad Max series, but a self-funded adaptation of The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, a short story by A.S. Byatt. Miller, now 77, has capitalized on the triumphant success of his last film (Fury Road made almost $375 million worldwide and was nominated for 10 Oscars) to make a pure passion project, trading postapocalyptic chaos and crazy cars in the desert for spiritual reminiscence in a hotel room. 
A diverse director with a signature vision
This latest chapter in Miller’s career is not altogether surprising, in the sense that his whole career has been surprising. Longing is just the 11th full-length feature he has directed in 44 years, suggesting a man who chooses his projects with great care. He could be called a franchise specialist; besides the gory Mad Max series, he has also created the Babe series, about a charming talking pig, and the Happy Feet films, where penguins dance and sing classic songs. Outside of that franchise framework, however, he has only helmed the medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil and the fantasy-screwball romp The Witches of Eastwick. Miller has run the gamut, providing something for everybody from young children to macho action junkies to highbrow critics. What unifies all of his work is his visual kineticism and his sense of wonder.

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Three Thousand Years of Longing review: George Miller takes a left turn off Fury Road
Idris Elba pleads with Tilda Swinton.

To what magic lamp, monkey’s paw, or wishing well does George Miller owe his career of improbable dream projects? On and off for decades, this Aussie writer-director and demolition derby-ist has wrangled bountiful resources in pursuit of offbeat glory, splurging top studio dollar on dubiously “family-friendly” menageries and increasingly elaborate dystopias. The pinnacle of his talent for turning a multiplex investment into a madman’s sandbox is, of course, his last movie, the staggering Mad Max: Fury Road, which was essentially a vision of what summer movies can be when made by real artists left to their own lunatic devices. What an impossible movie it was — and a tough act to follow, too.

So how has Miller followed his exhilarating epic of dirt, dust, fire, speed, and mayhem? As it turns out, with a change of pace. His new movie, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is at once vaster and more compact than his last one, trading an endless stretch of desert for a hotel room; a few days of action for a story that literally spans millennia; and a nonstop barrage of vehicular carnage for extended scenes of two characters in bathrobes, politely discussing the true nature of desire over tea and chickpea treats. And yet here, too, is an impossible movie — a strange and bewitching fairy tale for adults, unfashionable in its cerebral whimsy and mid-budget wizardry. You could say that the success of Fury Road paid for this more idiosyncratic fantasy, but that would be akin to arguing that Miller sold a unicorn to buy a leprechaun.

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