Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Mad Max: Fury Road

A rather exquisite piece of filmmaking, George Miller returns to a genre he perfected more than thirty years ago, with a capstone in his lengthy and impressive career. As Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself captured by a ruthless warlord and held prisoner as a blood donor, events lead him to the cabin of a cross-country tanker delivering precious cargo to a fabled land far from the deadly desert in which they all live.

Speaking to the depravity of mankind looking for pure children, free of the cancer with which their people have been afflicted, a malicious man loses the concubines he’s been holding prisoner to a rebellious military leader (Charlize Theron) who wishes to liberate them from their plight as sex slaves and baby factories. Max and Furiosa (Theron) must band together against nearly insurmountable odds to protect the women and deliver them safely to a place where they will be able to live better lives.

Theron and Hardy are magnificent as are the many supporting actors at work in the film, including Nicholas Hoult as a near-mindless grunt working for Immortant Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the cruel man who seeks redemption through forced impregnation and a perfect heir. My opinions of Mad Max: Fury Road demand time to marinate. The listed rating here could change downwards depending on how I shake out my thoughts. The only elements that grated on my nerves are the fade transitions, which seem rudimentary and distracting, and the sometimes fuzzy images that made things seem, at times, entirely unrealistic. However, this compelling narrative is filled with rich subtext, pensive ruminations on societal afflictions and the state of risk and redemption as a byproduct of ones actions and desires.