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George Miller is one of our great fantasists. His pictures, filled as they are with all manners of magical, grotesque, and phantasmagorical sights, are quite simply made for the big screen. With Miller’s latest, Three Thousand Years Of Longing, hitting theaters this weekend, we figured this was as good a time as any to provide our readers with a ranked listing of Miller’s films. Happy reading!
11. Happy Feet Two (2011)
The original Happy Feet made a killing at the worldwide box office, so a sequel was always a more or less inevitable prospect. That said, for better and (mostly) worse, Happy Feet Two doubles down on all the quirks that make the first film alternately vexing and confounding. Miller gleefully throws the results into a stylistic blender, with little regard for cohesion of any kind. Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, and Hugo Weaving return, but even the buzzy presence of co-stars like Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Common, and Sofia Vergara can’t disguise the fact that this is easily the great Australian director’s least-interesting outing to date.
10. 40,000 Years Of Dreaming (1997)
40,000 Years Of Dreaming isn’t so much a proper George Miller feature as much as it is a curio for the day-one fans: both a celebration and also an existential interrogation of cinema that attempts to span a century in Australian moviemaking and beyond. Narrated by Miller himself, the unapologetically academic 40,000 Years is almost certainly the filmmaker’s most sedate film work to date. To be sure, there’s some fascinating stuff here about Australia’s colonial past and the looming cultural influence of Aboriginal beliefs and practices. Among the referenced works is the infamous outback nightmare, Wake In Fright, and also the 1976 coming-of-age drama, The Devil’s Playground.
9. Happy Feet (2006)
A film so deranged that it feels practically avant-garde by the standards normally reserved for contemporary children’s entertainment, George Miller’s Happy Feet is every bit as off-the-wall as Babe: Pig In The City, even if its flights of whimsical fancy don’t manage to stick the landing in quite the same way as that inspired sequel. Elijah Wood is Mumbles, a tap-dancing Penguin who journeys across a vast landscape of ice and sea, rendered here with every inch of Miller’s typical visual fetishism. In the process, our pure, good-hearted hero stumbles into a surprisingly prescient allegory for climate change and environmental disaster. Happy Feet is certainly adorable even when its songs are grating and while its message posits it as a fairly radical kid’s adventure, politically speaking, the tonal wonkiness and erratic plotting means it exists largely for Miller completists.
8. Lorenzo’s Oil (1998)
A relatively conventional medical melodrama that only feels like one of Miller’s out-there cinematic concoctions if you’re paying close enough attention, Lorenzo’s Oil is a significant stylistic departure for its creator in more ways than one. It’s the rare instance of Miller tackling a true-to-life tale: In this case, the story of Lorenzo Odone, a boy afflicted with a rare and lethal neurological condition, and his parents, Augusto and Michaela. The film also sees Miller stepping outside his sandbox of uncanny children’s films, Aussie fantasy, and blistering Mad Max epics to work with Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon, both of whom give terrific, soul-baring performances in this film. Lorenzo’s Oil shouldn’t be anyone’s introduction to George Miller, but it remains a fascinating and heartfelt anomaly in an utterly singular filmography.
7. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Even for a George Miller film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is more than a bit overblown. Here, excess isn’t just the name of the game: it’s part of this particular movie’s fundamental appeal. Whether it’s the Thunderdome itself – an elaborately conceived gladiatorial pit where wasteland warriors duel to the death – or the original songs penned by Mel Gibson’s co-star, Tina Turner, Beyond Thunderdome is filled with otherworldly spectacle and a unique end-of-times vision that could have only sprung from the mind of one living filmmaker. If this shimmering third chapter fails to meet the considerably high standards set by its predecessors, it’s only because those earlier films were so far ahead of their time.
6. Mad Max (1979)
This is where it all started, people: The cars, the chaos, the social collapse, the scorching desert nihilism, the glowering scowl of Mel Gibson… all of it. Mad Max has gone on to cement its status as one of the most daring film franchises bridging the 20th to the 21st century. But alas, it all began as a gritty, to-the-bone piece of Ozploitation made by a then-unknown mad genius from Queensland. The O.G. Mad Max isn’t quite as primally satisfying as some of the entries that arrive later in the series, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone who’s passionate about Miller’s body of work not having seen it.
5. Three Thousand Years Of Longing (2022)
While fans wait for 2024’s Furioisa, they can get stuck into a film that is stuffed to the gills with eye-popping imagery and fantastic performances. Three Thousand Years of Longing, by George Miller’s standards, almost feels quaint: It’s the bittersweet, structurally mischievous story of a narratologist played by Tilda Swinton who makes the acquaintance of a very literal genie (sorry, Djinn), played in a key of wistful romantic resignation by the great Idris Elba. Miller’s latest is a fairy tale about the power of storytelling itself, and an audacious, surprisingly tender maximalist banquet that beats with a human heartbeat.
4. Babe: Pig In the City (1998)
Musical icon Tom Waits is on the record as being a massive fan of Miller’s deliriously heightened fever-dream sequel to Babe, titled Pig In The City (Nightmare Alley co-screenwriter Kim Morgan is also a defender, having penned this brilliant piece on the film’s many merits). While this might seem incongruous at the outset, Pig In The City is actually filled with fantastical, aggressively surreal imagery that recalls Waits’ music and Miller’s larger filmography: a sad clown, a hot-pink poodle, cityscapes that feel almost brazenly un-real, and a derelict hotel inhabited by anthropomorphized chimpanzees. Pig In The City is a peculiar and miraculous narrative whirlwind about the terror of facing life away from the comforts of home.
3. The Witches Of Eastwick (1987)
George Miller isn’t really what you’d call a horny director – he’s certainly no Adrian Lyne – but there’s no denying that his lusty, hot-blooded, deliriously funny adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches Of Eastwick is as carnal as today’s blockbusters are overwhelmingly sexless. This spiky, pitch-black supernatural farce showcases a trio for the ages: Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer as unfulfilled Rhode Island women who come to believe they are witches after they fall under the spell of a charismatic but seemingly insane stranger played by, who else, Jack Nicholson. Derided by more than a few critics in its time, The Witches Of Eastwick has emerged as a cult classic for the ages, and one of the most conceptually loopy cinematic experiments Miller has ever given us.
2. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Miller’s spectacular apocalyptic opus, The Road Warrior, lands somewhere in between the barren, stripped-down minimalism of 1979’s original Mad Max and the baroque indulgences of Beyond Thunderdome. It’s a rugged and ruthless tale of survival against the odds, and the story of a hard man who rediscovers what it means to be human. However, it’s also a practically superhuman show of technical prowess from Miller, as this hellaciously turbo-charged sequel offers more of everything that made the original Max such a powerful oddity upon its original release. The Road Warrior is a pure punk rock war cry, and one of the defining action pictures of the 80s.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
One of the most dizzyingly kinetic and visually impressionistic blockbusters ever made within the Hollywood studio system, Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t just the gonzo apex of the Mad Max franchise: it’s a fearless, firing-on-all-cylinders re-invention of what is so inherently special about this specific cinematic mythology. Tom Hardy seethes and snarls with pent-up ferocity as a more taciturn Max Rockatansky, who joins forces with a cadre of freedom fighters played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, and Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in the hopes of taking down a ghoulish desert despot known as Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Fury Road is a note-perfect guitar solo of a movie: a 200-mph ride through the barbarous ends of the earth where the creativity and pure love of moviemaking all but bleeds through the screen. Shiny, shine chrome indeed!
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