In remarks to guests at his newly opened gallery celebrating the work of legendary photojournalist Harry Benson this week, Wizards and Capitals owner Ted Leonsis mentioned that he’d just read a biography of Enzo Ferrari. “The first thing he did when he designed his car was he ripped off the rearview mirror,” Leonsis gushed. “He said, ‘I don’t care what’s behind us.’”

To be fair to the billionaire, Leonsis was in the habit of declaring his future-focused-ness long before his plan to move the Wizards and the Caps to Virginia fell apart last spring after Democrats in the General Assembly refused to back the proposal championed by private equity vulture-turned-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. (Youngkin promptly turned his attention to purging voter rolls.) Soon after the Virginia deal imploded, the District announced it would spend $515 million on upgrades to Capital One Arena as part of an agreement that will keep the Wizards and the Caps downtown until at least 2050. Loose Lips reporter Alex Koma points out that several of the mogul’s pettiest demands—including that he be exempted from taxes that benefit D.C.-based sports franchises he does not own—have been weeded out of the final proposal.

One of the ways Leonsis is demonstrating his renewed commitment to the District of Columbia is via the two-story, 10,000-square-foot makeshift gallery in a former hair salon adjacent to the arena that celebrates Benson’s work and its connection to the federal city. 

The Glasgow-born Benson rocketed to fame in his early 30s, when the London Daily Express assigned him to photograph the Beatles in Paris. Benson subsequently accompanied the ascendant Liverpudlians on their first U.S. tour in 1964. On Feb. 11 of that year, the Beatles played their first American concert at the Washington Coliseum—formerly the Uline Arena, and since 2016, a “flagship” REI outdoor recreation store in NoMa. (So it’s not necessarily a love of corporate naming that prompted Leonsis, at a press conference last Monday, to refer to the site as “REI Arena” while waxing on the breadth of Benson’s career.) 

“Harry is, I believe, the world’s most important living photojournalist,” Leonsis said.

Certainly, Benson’s photos of politicians, entertainers, and athletes from Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor to O.J. attorney Johnny Cochran and U.S Army General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf made him one of the key figures in how the most powerful people in the second half of the 20th century were perceived. He covered Robert F. Kennedy extensively—he was standing next to the presidential candidate when an assassin shot him dead on June 5, 1968. Unsurprisingly, Benson’s decision to publish his pictures of the tragedy—including one of a terror-stricken Ethel Kennedy attempting to push him away from her just-shot husband—was controversial. 

Leonsis, a longtime collector of Benson’s photographs, called the 94-year-old shutterbug “my best friend” in his remarks earlier this week. The occasion was the opening of the exhibit of about 180 Benson photos from the personal collections of Leonsis and his business partner, Jeffrey Skoll. Portraits of every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower are part of the show, along with photos of Ali, the Beatles, Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, and other notable figures. 

“We developed this with an eye for Instagram,” Leonsis said. “Big pictures, small copy.” His audience laughed, but Leonsis wasn’t kidding.

At a separate press conference last Monday attended by Loose Lips, Leonsis couldn’t resist comparing his own makeshift gallery to the more permanent one on the other side of 7th St. NW. 

“I walked through the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery around the corner the other day, and this is nicer,” Leonsis said. “This tells a better story. And so, your move, Smithsonian! Let’s uplift.”

Pressed on the comment moments later, Leonsis said, “the Smithsonian was created to collect, not to tell a story.” He then pivoted to praise Benson’s dedication to his craft. “This man was very close with John Lewis and with Martin Luther King,” Leonsis said. “In Selma, Alabama; in Mississippi, he was tear-gassed, was arrested, beaten. It’s an amazing history when you sit with him and talk to him.” 

It’s clear enough from his “tells a better story” comment that Leonsis was talking about curation, not the quality of the National Portrait Gallery’s holdings. Still, the NPG might take umbrage, given that the 62-year-old institution’s published mission statement is “to tell the story of America by portraying the people who shape the nation’s history, development and culture.” Comparing an exhibition of a single photographer’s work focused on a single city to that of a gallery comprising a variety of such exhibitions is hardly an apples-to-apples scenario. It’s more like apples-to-orchard. 

In fact, the NPG hosted a show of Benson’s work—organized by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery—in 2007. Ironically, then-Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau’s mixed review of that exhibit shares a common element with Leonsis’s far more extemporaneous remarks from 17 years later. Garreau criticized Benson for having frequently staged the scenes captured in his famous photos—a shot of the Beatles having a pillow fight, for example, or another one, 28 years later, of Bill and Hillary Clinton canoodling in a hammock outside the Arkansas governor’s mansion. 

“What you see is an awww-inspiring photo of two people who seem very much in love,” Garreau wrote of that shot of the Clintons. “The viewer, however, might be happier appreciating the image and not reading the wall caption. For there it is revealed that Benson set it up.” He does not dispute Benson’s skill or artistry as a photographer; it’s simply his claim to be a photojournalist that makes Garreau cry foul. “The reason Benson is not well remembered may be that, much of the time, the territory he worked was not so much news, as he might have you believe, but what only can be described as display advertising,” Garreau concluded. 

The review got Garreau a published rebuke from Benson himself, who called it “gratuitously mean-spirited and embarrassing.”

But Garreau did advise visitors to just enjoy the photos and ignore the captions. Or as Leonsis put it 17 years later, “Big pictures, small copy.”

It Can’t Happen Here is the Sinclair Lewis novel that imagines a fascist takeover of the United States by populist candidate promising to restore the nation to some vaguely defined idea of its former greatness. Like the European strongmen of its time (the book was published in 1935), Sinclair’s fictitious dictator-in-waiting, Senator “Buzz” Windrip, runs on a platform of demonizing immigrants, academics, and journalists. He defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 election, imprisons his political opponents, and asserts a degree of presidential power that would have the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves. The book ends with Windrip in exile and the U.S. in the grip of a civil war.

Lewis modeled the character of Windrip on Louisiana Governor-turned-U.S. Senator Huey Long, who was readying a presidential bid when an assassin killed him about six weeks before the publication of It Can’t Happen Here. A Federal Theatre Project-sponsored stage adaptation of It Can’t Happen Here, the first of many, opened in 17 U.S. markets a week before the 1936 election. A new six-part audio-play version premiered earlier this month.

Lewis’ 1922 satire, Babbitt, by contrast, hadn’t been adapted for almost 90 years when playwright Joe DiPietro’s Matthew Broderick-starring version opened at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse last November, even though the novel was a bestseller that continues to enjoy a reputation, at least in some quarters, as its author’s crowning achievement. That production, its two-time Tony Award-winning star and its director, Christopher Ashley, are now at the Shakespeare Theatre Company through Nov. 3, when it wraps two nights before Election Day. (Ann Harada, identified as “Storyteller #1” in the program but who plays Myra Babbitt, the titular George Babbitt’s neglected spouse, is one of four cast members who carries over from the La Jolla production.) 

It’s possible that Babbitt-the-book is so subtle and interior that it resists translation. It’s certain that Lewis’ critique of middle-class striving—published just a few years before the Great Depression and a war that left as many as 80 million people dead—didn’t need anything close to a full century to start looking like a postcard from better days. Mocking the materialism and conformity of the middle class has been like kicking a corpse for decades now.

Even if that’s an overstatement, DiPietro’s watery adaptation makes it readily apparent why other Lewis novels—such as Elmer Gantry, which got a musical adaptation at Signature a decade ago—have been revisited more frequently than this one. George Babbitt, the novel’s satirical target, is merely fascism-curious, a mid-level real estate broker whose middle-class malaise leads him into a flirtation with political demagoguery, as well as more common middle-aged stations of the cross like an extramarital dalliance with a younger woman (Mara Davi, who doubles as the production’s dance captain). His teenage son (Chris Myers) would rather be a mechanic than aim for law school as George has decreed he must; his best friend (Nehal Joshi) philanders and quarrels violently with his wife. Confounded by these trials, George chooses to direct his sleepy gaze at the wider world.

It’s a big bummer that the show never really finds a way to avoid being infected by the indolence it’s meant to be sending up. Babbitt seems more suited to reinvention for the “End of History” ’90s than for 2024, and it shares many of the flaws that made 1999’s similarly themed Best Picture winner, American Beauty, so insufferable even back then. One of that year’s many more rewarding and insightful films was, ironically, the Broderick-starring farce Election—a much richer showcase for the onetime Ferris Bueller’s blend of charm and frailty than Babbitt. In DiPietro’s play, the 62-year-old star seems to take almost perverse delight in burying the qualities that have made him a beloved stage-and-screen draw since the Reagan era. 

Yes, Babbitt has been sleepwalking through his own low-impact existence, but it might also be a self-aware joke about the show’s star-driven genesis that Broderick is literally wheeled onstage while lying prone on a library cart with his eyes closed. (DiPietro wrote the adaptation specifically for Broderick after the pair first collaborated on the Broadway production of Nice Work If You Can Get It in 2012.) His seven castmates introduce him via a round-robin shared narration, informing us that Babbitt is “not fat, but exceedingly well fed,” that he is “loyal to baseball and the Republican party,” and that each of the appliances with which he has appointed his home in the fictional American city of Zenith are from “the best of the nationally advertised brands.” The phase will be repeated for comic effect long after that effect has dissipated. Broderick gets his biggest laugh of the night just by showing us how long it takes George to lower his husk to the floor when Davi, as his mistress, invites him to sit there. But the comedy of advancing age spares no one in the end.

The incident that temporarily shakes George from his cushy torpor is a speech to a local civic group wherein he castigates “socialist sissies and whining suffragettes.” (The 19th Amendment was ratified only two years before Babbitt was published.) This makes him, briefly, a useful idiot to an oily party official played by Matt McGrath. Broderick’s sedate affect, little modulated whether he’s addressing his family at the breakfast table or addressing a crowd in public, just reaffirms what the seven “storytellers” have already told us—any beliefs the character may hold are purely fungible; he’s merely getting off on provocation, like a child who has just discovered profanity. True to life, sure, but not exactly revelatory. His catchphrase? “That’s the stuff!” Language, George.

Walt Spangler’s clean, angular set splits the difference between a poorly stocked public library and an Apple Store, populating its grid of white shelves with books featuring library labels on their spines. (Myra aspired to have her own library card, you see, and her own rebellion against conformity takes the form of her choosing to spend her days reading rather than tending to the household chores.) Lighting designer Cha See bathes this white canvas in various shades of color that seem to signify whatever emotion George is suppressing at any given moment. It’s yet another indication that Babbitt isn’t just better suited to the last century than to this one—it’s better suited to prose than to the stage.

Babbitt, co-produced with La Jolla Playhouse, written by Joe DiPietro, adapted from Sinclair Lewis’ novel, and directed by Christopher Ashley, runs through Nov. 3 at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall. shakespearetheatre.org. $39–$215.

This post has been updated: The original said Ann Harada is the only other member of the cast who carries over from the La Jolla production, in fact actors Chris Myers and Matt McGrath were in the production from La Jolla as well.

“A film director is one of the last truly dictatorial posts left,” Francis Ford Coppola said with just a trace of wistfulness in 1990, “in a world that’s getting more and more democratic.”

The observation comes from Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the superb 1991 documentary looking back on what in the mid-’70s seemed like it would become the ruinous and incomprehensible folly of the Godfather auteur’s career, Apocalypse Now. A loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness, set amid America’s war in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now was plagued by mid-shoot cast changes and health crises, an ongoing civil war in the Philippines (where Coppola was shooting), a perversely uncooperative star in Marlon Brando, and set-destroying Acts of God. By the time it finally hit cinemas in August 1979, three and a half years after the first day of filming, Coppola had sunk every penny of his personal net worth into the project and more, all to ensure he’d retain full creative control … of a film he would subsequently revise and rerelease twice. 

But Apocalypse Now was a hit (and a masterpiece) the first time around, which emboldened its maker to gamble again—this time on the 1982 musical One From the Heart. The movie was such a financial debacle that it permanently altered the trajectory of Coppola’s career, forcing the most singular American film artist of a generation, still only in his early 40s, into taking paycheck jobs. But he perceived even then that a coming digital revolution would change how movies were made and distributed, and he dreamed of being able to work on a grand scale again.

In his 2023 biography, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, author Sam Wasson says Coppola completed his first draft of Megalopolis on March 12, 1984. And now that it’s arrived—in September 2024, the kindest thing I can say about the opus that Coppola has been mulling over for more than half his life is that it’s a truly singular fiasco—a rich tapestry of madness no one else could’ve made. It’s formally audacious—split screens, overlapping dialogue, kaleidoscopic cuts—and utterly incoherent. Post-coherent, if you’re feeling kind. 

Good for him! To compare golden apples to golden apples, Ferrari, Michael Mann’s long-contemplated biopic of the sports car maker, and Avatar, the sci-fi eco-fable James Cameron started writing in his teens and started shooting in his 50s, are both much stronger movies than Megalopolis. But they’re also narratively conventional in a way that felt disappointing after so much anticipation. For all their craft, they play like lesser echoes of their makers’ most inspired films.

Megalopolis, by contrast, is unlike anything Coppola has previously attempted, a $120 million ball of yarn that some of us will busy ourselves trying to untangle for years to come—even as we can see plainly that the emperor of New Rome has no clothes.

The movie is set in an America only slightly more decadent than ours, in the city of New Rome, which features recognizable Manhattan locations like the Chrysler Building and Madison Square Garden. Its essential conflict is between the unpopular Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver, who starred in Ferrari as well), a vaguely Robert Moses-style urban reformer who heads up something called the Design Authority. Catalina is agitating to rebuild much of the city using “The Megalon”—a miracle self-regenerating building material that he won the Nobel Prize for discovering. 

It’s never clear why Cicero doesn’t have the authority simply to fire Catalina—is the Design Authority a state or federal agency outside his chain of command? But you won’t have a lot of brain space to contemplate the New Rome org chart because before we even learn that Catalina has invented a world-changing substance, we see that he can stop the flow of time, a Godlike superpower that’s neither explained nor deeply explored. He also seems to be able to perceive various possible futures by harnessing the almighty power of the Megalon somehow.

That seems like grist enough for an epic, doesn’t it? Well, hold Coppola’s Falernian wine, because he also throws in a scheming TV journalist named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, who seems the least at sea of all the famous faces in this sprawling cast). She’s having an affair with Catalina, but has designs on Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), Catalina’s aged, mega-rich uncle. Then there’s the burgeoning relationship between Catalina and Mayor Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who alone seems immune to Catalina’s time-pausing ability. There’s also a deepfake sex-tape blackmail plot against Catalina courtesy of his jealous, openly incestuous cousin Clodo (Shia LaBeouf, who, like Plaza, sort of seems like he knows what he’s doing here, remarkably). We also have portentous narration from Apocalypse Now alumnus Laurence Fishburne, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances by Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman as minor mayoral associates.

Also, there’s a former (?) Soviet satellite in a decaying orbit that’s threatening to wipe out the city. This is a minor subplot. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Catalina was tried and acquitted for his wife’s murder, and that the district attorney who led that unsuccessful prosecution was now-Mayor Cicero.

Shot largely on soundstages in Georgia—like so many Marvel movies, sadly—Megalopolis is often visually flat and lacking in texture, which is not something you can say about Apocalypse Now or One from the Heart. It feels like a 138-minute supercut of a 10-hour streaming series, except for the times when it feels like you might be having a stroke. 

In keeping with its Roman milieu, Megalopolis is most thrilling when it prioritizes sheer spectacle. Coppola pulls off two audacious set pieces: The first comes when Cicero and Catalina face off at the mayor’s unveiling of a proposed redevelopment project, with the entire cast of the film suspended above a large-scale model of the building site on gantries supported by ropes. Catalina filibusters the mayor’s announcement—at least I think that’s what he’s doing—by performing Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in full while LaBeouf rocks the freely swinging scaffolds playfully and everyone else holds on for dear life. It feels like something Coppola must’ve dreamt.

The other bravura sequence comes at the wedding of of Plaza’s Wow to Voight’s Crassus, a blowout at what narrator Fishburne calls “The Coliseum”—it’s Madison Square Garden—complete with wrestlers, an auction for a Vestal Virgin pop star (!), and a chariot race like the one in Ben-Hur. Catalina gets drunk and high at the celebration, and Coppola intercuts his internal trip with the Bacchanal happening outside his head. 

And yet cataloging Megalopolis’ considerable virtues and even more numerous deficiencies seems both pointless and premature, because there is zero chance this will be the definitive version of this mess. Coppola is second perhaps only to his contemporary Ridley Scott in his zeal for issuing new cuts of his films years or decades after their initial theatrical run. He wasn’t satisfied to leave his initial releases of Apocalypse Now, or One from the Heart, or The Outsiders, or The Cotton Club, or The Godfather Part III alone, and every last one of those was more complete and functional in its initial, imperfect state than Megalopolis is.  

Filmmaking is still a largely dictatorial profession, at least for auteurs who have a Godfather on their resume. Alas, unlike in the ’90s, the world is no longer growing more democratic. “When we leap into the unknown, we prove we are free,” Catalina remarks as Megalopolis nears its impenetrable denouement. Coppola, 86 years old and free as a bird, deserves credit for taking that leap.

Megalopolis (138 minutes), rated R for every excessive ancient Rome reference and a preponderance of unflattering Caesar cuts, opened in area theaters on Sept. 27.

I’d be doing Round House Theatre’s stirring new production of Mfoniso Udofia’s stranger-in-a-strange land drama, Sojourners, no favors by telling you the play is but the first entry in Udofia’s nine-part saga surveying the experiences of a family of Nigerian immigrants in the United States. That makes it sound like the kind of bone-dry academic thesis that one of Sojourners’ characters—a pious, committed student named Disciple (Kambi Gathesha)—is working on as he’s introduced. But despite Udofia’s August Wilson-like ambition to work on a grand scale, this first chapter in what she’s called The Ufot Cycle is intimate and insightful on its own modest terms. (Three of the other Ufot plays have already received full productions at various theaters nationwide, and next month a coalition of Boston-based companies will begin staging all nine entries over a two-year period.)

Set in Houston in 1978, Sojourners follows the trials of Abasiama (Billie Krishawn)—“Ama” to her friends—a tough, smart, pregnant young woman who works at a gas station to support her deadbeat husband, Ukpong (Opa Adeyemo). He’s a full-time student who’s been lured away from campus by the temptations of records (Motown, early Prince) and beer (Guinness, mostly). The couple’s marriage was arranged by their fathers, and their intentions are to return to Nigeria after earning their degrees in America. 

As the evening opens, Ukpong is starry-eyed after attending a political rally in lieu of showing up for class. Ama, however, gets a more earthbound dose of the American dream during her graveyard shift, when Moxie (Renea S. Brown), a working girl who already bears the physical and psychological scars of her high-risk profession, asks for—well, demands—Ama’s help filling out a job application. That Ama’s command of written English far surpasses that of the native Texan with whom she’ll form an unlikely bond of mutual protection is the kind of observation that Udofia, herself the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, says she wrote the play to make. (Like other Americans, Moxie assumes that Ama hails from “the jungle.”) 

Moxie isn’t the only person who’s drawn to Ama’s innate goodness and strength—Disciple (Kambi Gathesha) also inserts himself into Ama’s already-full-to-bursting life, believing that it must be God’s will that he ran out of gas near a “petrol station” staffed by a woman who speaks the same dialect he does. (Udofia pointed out in a 2017 New York Times profile that 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria.) Cursed with a husband who lacks focus and ambition, Ama now finds herself fending off a would-be suitor who has arguably too much of both. If director Valerie Curtis–Newton’s sturdy production has a flaw, it’s that the early scenes of Disciple alone in his room, surrounded by discarded wads of balled-up paper, feel a bit cartoonish in their depiction of the struggle of writing, and that their conflation of the creative struggle with that of assimilation or at least survival in an often-hostile foreign land devalues both experiences somehow. Once Disciple finds his way to Ama’s bulletproof-glass booth stocked with Snickers bars (one Yankee temptation to which Ama shall succumb) and Shiner Bock—the most evocative of the environments scenic designer Paige Hathaway has placed upon a revolving set—this weakness falls away.

Everyone in the cast Curtis-Newton has marshaled is compelling, but Krishawn’s Ama is its absorbing anchor. She resists the temptation to make Ama saintly in her suffering, showing us instead the terrible cost that Ama’s forced maturity exacts from her. It’s a truly accomplished and dimensional performance, one that leaves us yearning to know what will befall Ama and her baby daughter next. We’re fortunate that Udofia already knows.

Sojourners, by Mfoniso Udofia and directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton runs through Oct. 6 at Round House Theatre. Fall Arts Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. roundhousetheatre.org. $50–$93.

Alien, Ridley Scott’s gutsy 1979 landmark, has spawned sequels, prequels, and spinoffs so numerous that even I haven’t sought them all out. (Sorry not sorry, Alien vs. Predator.) This despite the fact that 1986’s Aliens, the first and best of the follow-ups, was one of those seminal documents that imprinted itself on my nascent imagination indelibly, as only a specimen of art one encounters at an extremely impressionable age can. But even though it’s been nearly a decade since we hit peak legasequel—Mad Max: Fury Road, Creed, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens all came out in 2015; each one renewing a born-in-the-’70s franchise that had since fallen on hard artistic times—we’ve never had a legasequel to Alien. 

Not until now, that is. The new Alien: Romulus is a lean, tactile throwback of a futuristic thriller that crossbreeds the gathering dread of Alien with the pass-the-ammo action of Aliens in a way the series has been trying—really, really hard—to manage for decades. This new entry is not a (double) jaw-dropper like those two; it’s a shrewd return to form that shall forever be in contention for the dubious honor of Third-Best Alien, or Best Sigourney Weaver-less Alien, or Best Alien This Century. But like all four of the Alien flicks made in the previous one, it is recognizably the work of a promising, youngish filmmaker who has already developed a distinct style—and whose new employers have not required him to shed that style like a rapidly outgrown skin. 

In this case that enterprising auteur is Uruguayan horror guy Fede Álvarez, who has three prior features under his belt—more than Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, or Jean-Pierre Jeunet had when they made their Alien movies. Álvarez actually pays homage to his own low-budget 2016 nailbiter, Don’t Breathe, in one Romulus set piece, along with the obligatory (and too frequent) callbacks to the universally beloved Scott and Cameron Alien movies. It’s an admirable blend of swagger and reverence, and I respect it. 

The screenplay, credited to Álvarez and his longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues, is set during the 57-year interregnum between Alien and Aliens, and shares with those two films the conviction that the real monster is rapacious, interstellar capitalism, as represented by the android-making, planet-colonizing Weyland-Yutani corporation. All of the previous movies have suggested that biological weapons were the application for which the company would sacrifice any number of its employees to get its hands on viable specimens. Romulus finally gives these C-suite sociopaths a more intriguing reason for wanting to capture and study these xenomorphs.

Rain Caradine (Cailee Spaeny from Civil War and Priscilla, stepping capably into Weaver’s Alien-stompin’ Reeboks as this movie’s Ripley surrogate) is a literal coal miner’s daughter, stuck in indentured servitude on a zero-daylight shithole planet after both her parents died of illnesses contracted in the mines. (This Is the Future That Conservatives Want.) Her closest companion is Andy (David Jonsson, versatile and compelling), a gentle, remaindered android Rain’s dad salvaged to look after her before he died. The fact that Rain has a bot who will do whatever she asks is at least one of the reasons her pals invite her along on their caper to break into a decommissioned orbiting space station to steal the far-too-pricey-for-plebes hypersleep capsules that will allow them to snooze their away to some other planet where you can actually see a sun. (This is a heist movie; they coulda called it Ripley’s Eleven.) Andy is obsolete, but he still has the ones and zeroes required to interface with the supercomputer that manages the station—literal code-switching!—which is split into sections christened (or Roman-ed) Remus and Romulus.

There, there be monsters. Obviously.

But that doesn’t mean that Álvarez hasn’t come up with a few surprises, including one that I won’t spoil beyond pointing out that it’s as ironic as it is ethically dubious. He’s a sure hand at the set pieces, one-upping the swimming xenomorphs from 1997’s deeply weird, deeply French Alien Resurrection by forcing our heroes to battle these beasties—and dodge their corrosive, acid-like blood—in microgravity for the first time. 

Álvarez achieves the film’s retro aesthetic through the use of practical effects wherever possible, both to conjure up the grimy industrial interior of the Romulus and the nightmarish creatures that have infested it. They’re articulated full-scale puppets or performers in suits far more often than they’re CGI phantoms, and that textural reality gives the movie, well, texture. Production designer Naaman Marshall has done an admirable job of re-creating the clunky-CRT-screen aesthetic of Alien, and this movie even includes some nods to (sigh) the excellent and very cinematic Alien: Isolation video game released a decade ago. (Here, take my lunch money.)

While it seems wrong to prize reverence above ambition, I have to admit that Álvarez strikes me as a more capable steward of this franchise than the guy who created it. Scott’s two latter-day Alien prequels, 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien: Covenant, were both slicker visually and ambitious to a fault thematically in comparison to his original Alien. Scott felt compelled to tell us who “made” this incredibly hostile and adaptable species and why, and he answered this unasked question in a tension-obviating way that felt like someone coming in during the last few minutes of a great horror movie and flipping on every damn light in the house. Like George Lucas with his nigh-unwatchable Star Wars prequels, Scott was determined not merely to repeat his prior triumph; he wanted to expand upon it, and he did. By giving us something that was not nearly as good. Twice!

Alien: Romulus represents a passing of the torch—or the jury-rigged flamethrower—to a worthy successor. And now, in keeping with the tradition of the series, the talented Mr. Álvarez should step aside for the next guy. Who I hope won’t be a guy. 

Alien: Romulus (R, 119 minutes) opens at area theaters today.

Two dozen years and five presidential administrations ago, Hugh Jackman, in his first appearance as the feral, fast-healin’ Wolverine, cracked wise about the black leather togs he and his fellow X-Men wore into battle. 

“What would you prefer,” James Marsden’s Cyclops clapped back. “Yellow spandex?”

I’m not as ancient as the two centuries claimed by Mr. Knifey-Knuckles, but as someone who started reading The Uncanny X-Men when it had a cover price of $0.75, I may as well be. I recognized that joke about the spandex, back in Y2K (when the original X-Men premiered), as a reminder that there was a limit to how faithful Hollywood could, or should, be when adapting a long-running comic-book saga for a mainstream audience. And I bristled at the loud, performative laughter of my fellow nerds, signaling to one another that the joke was for us. It wasn’t that funny, bub.

A generation later, that constituency of loud-laughers is the mainstream audience. Marvel Studios has nurtured and rewarded it and is now, after several years of mediocre movies and deflating Disney+ spin-offs, determined to win it back. 

Which brings me to the artfully filthy, endlessly self-mocking Deadpool & Wolverine. The first X-flick to be set within the canonical Marvel Cinematic Universe is less a movie than a 127-minute, $200 million ouroboros, swollen with Muppets-style metacommentary about what a fan-servicing cash grab it is. But Jackman finally got his form-fitting yellow supersuit!

The long-delayed appearance of Wolverine’s canary-colored onesie—and the return of Jackman, who’d retired from the role with 2017’s stirring Logan before he ever got to wear it—has been a centerpiece of the movie’s marketing. It also turns out to be a major subject of Wade “Deadpool” Wilson’s (Ryan “Free Guy” Reynolds) fourth-wall-breaking narration. And of one of his sickest burns.

 “Friends don’t let friends leave home looking like they fight crime for the Los Angeles Rams,” he tells Wolvie. 

Because jokes this movie has got. You might not care about the yellow costume. You might not be swayed by the fact the film’s multiversal milieu empowers Reynolds, director and cowriter Shawn Levy, and their collaborators not only to resurrect long-dormant Marvel heroes like [REDACTED], but to corral stars whose long-rumored superhero turns never happened such as [REDACTED], and even coax a walk-on from [REDACTED] who in a surprise twist, plays [REDACTED] instead of [REDACTED]. If you care about precisely none of that, you might still find this thing a worthy diversion, just for the light-speed potty-mouthed quips. Surely no film from within the Disney megalith has ever given us so many euphemisms for masturbation—or so many jokes about Honda Odyssey minivans.

Me? I’m just here for Jackman.

He’s the best there is at what he does. And what he does is pretty nice! He’s not just the longest-serving cinematic superhero, he’s the best of them. He’s engendered so much goodwill, within and outside of the hit-and-miss X-films, that even the news that he was returning to the franchise after leaving it on such a high note was met with more curiosity than ire.

Jackman is excellent here, again, gamely playing along with jokes about his musical theater background, which is fair, and about his recent divorce, which feels below the X-logo belt. He brings a weight and resonance to Deadpool & Wolverine that it probably doesn’t need, and that no one else attempts. He’s not Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever back. He’s fully back, present and committed to the role and also fighting fit.

Does Deadpool & Wolverine deserve him? I don’t know. For me, Jackman’s cranky reluctant-hero schtick hasn’t worn nearly as thin over the course of eight X-pics (give or take a couple of cameos) as Reynolds’ motormouthed smarm offensive has in just three, but that’s a matter of taste. I don’t much care for the previous Deadpool movies, or for the character, or for the specific, early ’90s era of X-Men comics that spawned him. As an actor, Reynolds leaves me cold. But I can’t deny the commitment and passion he brings to the Deadpool cycle. I suspect its partisans will agree with me that this is the best of them by a Savage Land mile.

The plot, to the extent I could follow it, involves “Time Variance Authority” middle manager Paradox (a droll Matthew Macfadyen) dispatching Deadpool to recruit some alternate universe iteration of Wolverine to prevent the destruction of Deadpool’s timeline. I’m reliably informed this is a bit easier to follow if you’ve seen season two of Loki, which I have not. But even minus this presumably illuminating context, Paradox’s frequent mention of a device called a Time Ripper makes it clear we shouldn’t root for him.

Somehow this results in our bickering, bloodletting antiheroes finding themselves exiled to an interdimensional void called, um, The Void, which seems to have been designed on the assumption that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga would be a much bigger movie. (This film spends considerable energy parodying that one, which few in its projected-to-be-huge audience will have seen.) 

The Void is ruled by Cassandra Nova, literally the evil twin of X-Man-in-Chief Charles Xavier, who is played by a glabrous Emma Corrin (formerly Princess Di on The Crown) in an admirably dastardly performance. A powerful psychic like her brother, she is fond of violating her victims’ minds by penetrating their skulls with her grubby digits. The sight of her fingers sticking out of someone’s face is more upsetting than any of Deadpool & Wolverine’s gnarly fight sequences. Levy stages melees with skill and visual wit, which wasn’t quite enough to stop my eyes from glazing over as the next two dozen redshirts get shish-kebabbed, even if some of them are embodied, or at least voiced, by extremely famous actors.

There was another movie that did all this—really, all of this—for the other big superhero conglomerate just a year ago: The Flash, and it wasn’t just a flop, people loathed it. (I liked it okay.) There are also the animated Spider-Verse movies, which handle all this multiversal mishegosh and character-history essentialism with more elegance than Deadpool & Wolverine, and significantly less face-stabbing. The Spider-Verse films also dare to be about something larger than just their own tangled lore. Deadpool & Wolverine resolutely does not. 

But I had fun at Deadpool & Wolverine. I only wish its makers could’ve manifested a Dougray Scott cameo. Look it up.

Deadpool & Wolverine (127 minutes, R) opens Thursday night at area theaters.

Twisters feels like the accretion of several alarming trends: the acceleration of the climate emergency; the rapidity with which indie auteurs get sucked up into franchise world (Minari writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, in this instance); and the coronation of Glen Powell.

Okay, that last one isn’t so bad. Powell has a more cocksure vibe than his fellow Texan Bill Paxton (God rest his beautiful soul), who was second-billed to Helen Hunt in 1996’s Twister the way Powell is second-billed in Twisters to Daisy Edgar-Jones. Headlining his third film in seven months, Powell looks almost as dreamily Kenlike as Ryan Gosling, though he’s nowhere near as funny. Still it’s tough not to like the guy, even if he’s playing (checks notes) a former professional bull rider who actually has an advanced degree in meteorology, a fact he keeps under his 10-gallon hat so as not to damage his brand as a shit-kickin’ influencer. “He’s a hillbilly with a YouTube channel,” as someone puts it in this pretty good bad-weather movie.

Let me walk that back: By “pretty good,” I mean, “not a chore to sit through” and “I didn’t feel depressed watching it, the way I did 15 minutes into Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.” 

That’s probably because Twisters spares us the latter’s reckoning with the cruel march of time by belonging to a different genus of legacyquel/remake/retread—the kind that simply repeats the prior movie’s events but with all new, somewhat different characters. The 2024 film’s screenplay is by The Revenant scribe Mark L. Smith, but Twister screenwriters Michael Crichton and Anne–Marie Martin get a contractual-but-still-hilarious “based on characters by” credit. Which characters? The tornadoes?

Well, maybe! One idea that Twisters carries on from its 28-year-old ancestor—and from the less fondly recalled Jaws: The Revenge—is that destructive natural phenomena select their targets with specificity and intention. “We’re having a once-in-a-generation tornado outbreak in Oklahoma,” Javi, third lead Anthony Ramos, tells Edgar-Jones’ Kate, attempting to recruit her for his tornado-imaging mission. “It’s going after the people we love.” 

I have no idea what Powell’s character, a professional (?) storm-chaser with the highly cinematic name of Tyler Owens, aims to accomplish in Twisters, other than trying to get Kate to succumb to his gentle, low-presh seduction campaign. (An Arkansan, he calls her “City Girl” to get her daggum goat.) But I also have no idea why both he and Javi are so smitten with this lady, who’s just kind of a drag. The movie gets some comic mileage out of Tyler fashioning himself as “the Tornado Wrangler” and hawking merch with that slogan. Kate is more of a Tornado Whisperer, whose intuition for which way storms will swerve turns out to be more reliable than any of the high-tech gizmos Javi has brought along on their expedition. Which is not to say that the twisters in Twisters can’t still sneak up on our heroes like ninjas. They can! They do!

Like Hunt’s character in Twister, Kate is haunted by a tornado-involved fatality in her past. Unlike Hunt, Edgar-Jones cannot for one damn second convince us her life has been shaped by the fear of (subconscious desire for) a tornado to sweep her away, too. 

Kate was working on a method of (checks notes again) “choking out” a tornado in college when she stopped because a tornado she tried to kill (notes) killed her friends instead. She’ll get another chance to show that tornado what’s what—I’m assuming it’s the same tornado, the one to which Crichton and Martin imparted such a rich and dimensional inner life all those years ago. But only after a lovely interlude with Maura Tierney, who’s not playing the same character Lois Smith played in Twister but serves the same function, and only after Kate and her confederates have spent a lot of time yelling at people who live in Oklahoma that they should hunker down in their basements when tornadoes happen. Thanks for the tip, City Girl. 

Twisters also honors its precursor by filling out even its minor roles with fun-to-spot contenders: Twister gave us Philip Seymour Hoffman, Todd Field, and Alan Ruck. The new film’s back-benchers include Brandon Perea, so fun as the motormouthed Geek Squad technician in Nope two summers ago; Katy O’Brian, so memorable as the lovestruck, drug-addled bodybuilder in spring’s Love Lies Bleeding; and newly caped Man of Steel David Corenswet. Amusingly, this palpable Clark Kent-type plays a total shitheel here. Since Twisters is both set and was shot in Oklahoma, I have to point out that its paucity of Native American faces, even among the extras, is more than a little weird.

Again: No Chore to Sit Through. Twisters is both just barely a movie and more of a movie than Twister was, even as it reprises all its precursor’s block-rockin’ beats. Remember the scene where a drive-in playing The Shining got all Twisted up? True to its title, Twisters pluralizes that sequence, sitting its climax against a horror double feature at the real-life Centre Theatre in El Reno, Oklahoma, pop. 16,989. “This theater isn’t built to withstand what’s coming!” Javi yells, a joke that’s more solid than the foundation of that building. Despite all its talk about aggressive and untamable weather, no one in Twisters ever imperils its earning potential by uttering the phrase “climate change.” I get it. Who among us wouldn’t rather seek shelter in a grand old cinema while the world outside gets whipped and buffeted away?

If there’s a threequel, it’ll need an appellation that portends even more chaos and destruction than Twisters. 

Twitter, anyone?

Twisters (PG-13, 122 minutes) is in area theaters today, July 19.

Credit writer-director Jeff Nichols, a half-dozen features into his career, with staying out of the Franchise Wars. At least two films on his resume, the sublime 2011 eco-psychological thriller Take Shelter and 2016’s Midnight Special, fall squarely within the sci-fi/paranormal adventure space. In the years since, he was attached to follow-ups to A Quiet Place and Alien Nation—a little-remembered 1988 curiosity that starred James Caan and Mandy Patinkin as human and alien buddy-cops, respectively! (Neither came to fruition.) But instead of making those mooted sequels or reboots or brand extensions, Nichols has stubbornly continued to tell original stories.

His latest, The Bikeriders, is essentially Hogfellas, albeit with a bit less meat on the bone than that comparison would indicate. With Jodie Comer’s Kathy—who falls hard for Austin Butler’s taciturn biker Benny—as its narrator, the film follows the Stones-at-Altamount arc of biker gang “the Vandals” devolving over the course of eight or 10 years from a mere public menace (albeit one that occasionally commits arson) into a violent criminal enterprise of hard drugs, sexual assault, human trafficking, and murder.

The Bikeriders is a work of fiction, though it was formally “inspired by” Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo book of the same name. (In a statement in the film’s production notes, Nichols calls it “the coolest book I’d ever come across.”) Mike Faist even appears in the film as Lyon, though he has little more to do than point a camera or a microphone at Comer or Michael Shannon and say, “What about [name of person]?” a half-dozen times. One of these scenes is set in 1973, five years after Lyon published The Bikeriders, which must be why Nichols gave Faist a line saying, in effect, “I just wanted to come talk to you again to find out what happened to everyone I profiled.”

Nichols is interested in exploring what binds people to charismatic leaders—that would be Tom Hardy’s Johnny, the Vandals’ aging, enigmatic chief—and the virtues and limitations of tribalism in an era that was arguably as turbulent and factionalized as the one we’re living in now. The film is explicit: Johnny’s inspiration to form a “motorcycle club” came from watching The Wild One on television. (Like The Bikeriders, that Marlon Brando-starring 1953 biker flick was a work of fiction inspired by a piece of journalism: a 1951 Harper’s Magazine story called “Cyclists’ Raid.”)

Besides his lodestar Shannon, who has appeared in all of his films, Nichols has rounded up some of the coolest character actors of recent vintage to play the grizzled members of the Vandals: Boyd Holbrook. Norman Reedus. Damon Herriman, so memorable as a lunkheaded ne’er-do-well on the great F/X series Justified. Toby Wallace makes a strong impression, too, as the leader of a younger group of bikers eager to join—or displace—the old guard.

Comer’s Chicagoland accent is dead-solid perfect. Hardy, as is his wont, has affected a vocal timbre native to no place on this planet; Butler is still playing Elvis. (With that dreamy midcentury mug of his, could the star of Masters of the Air and Dune Part Two ever be in a film set on present-day planet Earth? I am aware that he has, in fact, already done this. It was a rhetorical question.) But no one can say that Butler and Hardy don’t look good straddling Harleys, which seems to be the point.

While I can appreciate that the moment is right for a film exploring a pugnacious subculture, it mainly seems that Nichols and his actors were seduced by all the exterior stuff: the motorcycles; the denim, leather, and grease; the accents; the convincing recreation of 1960s Illinois. (The movie was mostly shot in Cincinnati.) The Bikeriders is no chore to sit through, it just doesn’t have the spark of originality that has animated Nichols’ strongest work. It’s a good film from an artist who’s shown us he’s capable of great ones. 

The Bikeriders (R, 116 minutes) opens in theaters nationwide on June 21.

Danny Glover was only 40 when cameras rolled on Lethal Weapon, the platonic ideal of bickering buddy-cop flicks, in which he played a straight-arrow, family-man detective facing dual crucibles: his 50th birthday (the makeup department grayed his hair) and being partnered with a reckless, possibly suicidal, younger cop.

Will Smith, 55, and Martin Lawrence, 59, the bickering buddy cops of the Bad Boys series, have each left the half-century mark behind. Smith’s Clinton-era tentpoles, Independence Day and Men in Black, have spawned (dire) sequels without him. But Bad Boys abides, carrying on the legacy of the Lethal Weapon-iad by foregrounding its romance between two straight men against the backdrop of run-and-gun, copaganda fantasy.

Despite the intercession of a global pandemic that made the prior entry, January 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, the biggest box office hit of the year, the interval between that installment and this fourth one is still by far the shortest gap between sequels in a series that began in 1995. That’s so long ago that Lawrence was the top-billed star of the original! So long ago that 2003’s abysmal Bad Boys II opened with our heroes busting a KKK rally with the battle cry, “Blue Power!” That hit differently two decades ago. (Though seeing Henry Rollins play a SWAT commander was just as weird then as it would be now.) And speaking of hitting, the new Bad Boys: Ride or Die—the first Smith vehicle to arrive in theaters since he smacked Chris Rock onstage at the 2022 Academy Awards—addresses that not-at-all funny incident in a way that is, well, pretty funny.

Because Bad Boys—as a relic of the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer era (with the homophobic jokes, in earlier installments, to prove it)—had to reinvent itself for the Marvel Age of cinema. There’s more narrative connective tissue between this installment and the previous one than in any of the earlier movies. Jacob Scipio’s Armando, the secret offspring of Smith’s Mike Lowrey who spent the prior film trying to murder his old man, is back, as are the group of younger, tech-savvier, and improbably hot cops played by Paola Núñez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Alexander Ludwig. The one who didn’t report for duty this time around is Charles Melton, who seems to be moving up in the world with his celebrated supporting turn in November’s May December. 

Because the new film requires you to recall this, I shall dutifully reiterate that Bad Boys for Life killed off their boss, Joe Pantoliano’s Captain Howard, a classic second-sequel move. (See also Skyfall, Daniel Craig’s 003rd 007 flick. And like Spectre, the fourth entry in that series, Bad Boys for Life brings back the slain leader in the form of a posthumous video message and a hallucination.) The new additions are Rhea Seehorn as Howard’s daughter, a revenge-obsessed U.S. Marshal, and Eric Dane as the film’s generically menacing heavy.

A conspiracy to frame, posthumously, their beloved Pepto Bismol-chugging Captain—and then the Smith and Lawrence characters themselves—drives the extremely loose plot of Bad Boys: Ride of Die. Shaggy even at an anachronistically brief 115 minutes, it still finds time to have Smith’s eternal playboy get married and for Lawrence’s Marcus Burnett to suffer a heart attack and recover instantly. (As is so often the case in this genre, Melanie Liburd, who plays Mike’s spouse, is given nothing to do other than to be taken hostage in the third act. Meanwhile, Theresa Randle, who played Theresa Burnett in the prior movies, has been recast by Tasha Smith, no relation.) 

Besides half-heartedly serving its cops-on-the-run plot, Ride or Die is also a legasequel in the vein of Creed, Top Gun: Maverick, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and so many others. Unlike those movies, it doesn’t really play up the generation gap among its heroes, or reckon with the passage of time in any substantial way. The writing committee used up all their hair dye and Viagra jokes in the prior movie, I guess. And Smith and Lawrence make no attempt to keep up with contemporaries Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves in the screen athletics department, tending to let the frenetic camerawork do the running for them.

Aiding and abetting them in this effort is the returning direction team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. These two Belgians were children when Bad Boys ’95 came out, but they once again attempt their own shock-and-awe variation on the already-chaotic visual grammar of Michael Bay (who directed the first two installments before moving on to the even dumber, louder pastures of the Transformers flicks), including a few knowing reprisals of Bay’s signature low-angle, slow-motion pans around their stars. This involves a lot of drone shots, and some first-person-shooter POV stuff that I find particularly distasteful. It’s a reminder that Bay’s bombastic style has been displaced in the past decade or so by the “gun-fu” that stuntpeople turned directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch pioneered with John Wick. Much as I’ve enjoyed those films, I hate that they’ve had the effect of turning seemingly every action movie character into a hyper-efficient mass shooter. 

That trend is on display throughout Ride or Die, but never more than in a bizarre scene in which Lowry and Burnett hack into Burnett’s home surveillance network so they can watch on TV while Burnett’s Marine son-in-law Reggie—played by Dennis Greene, whose appearances in the Bad Boys films circa 2003–2014 comprise the entirety of his filmography—mows down roughly a dozen attackers who’ve been sent to kill Burnett’s family. I much preferred the finale, set at “an abandoned theme park,” someone says, wherein several bad guys get eaten by a nine-foot albino alligator named Duke. Who says a 29-year-old specimen of late-20th-century copaganda can’t still surprise us?

Bad Boys: Ride or Die (R, 115 minutes) opened in area theaters June 7.

Operatic in scope and biblical in its savagery, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a profound achievement that seems destined to disappoint. It’s the most eagerly awaited movie of Australian trauma physician-turned-filmmaker George Miller’s 45-year second career, and to replicate the kind of glow-up that distinguished 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome from its rightly revered, generation-later follow-up, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, would be plainly impossible. 

Wisely, Miller doesn’t try. Having realized his ambition to make Fury Road an emotionally resonant feature-length chase without a moment of exposition to slow (or dumb) it down, he’s adopted a more episodic structure for the 148-minute Furiosa. It’s both the longest entry in the five-film Mad Max-iad (though this one keeps the Max to a min.) and the first to play out over an interval of years instead of days. And, just as Charlize Theron’s Furiosa stole the movie away from Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky in Fury Road, the title character gets robbed in the prequel. Here, second-billed Chris Hemsworth—having the time of his life behind a prosthetic proboscis and a cranked-to-11 spin on his native Aussie accent—fairly rides away with the movie. 

It’s traditional, of course, for the the hero/ine of this franchise in particular and the western/samurai/postapocalyptic genres in general to be taciturn and stoic, while the villains get to be verbose and grandiose. That’s Hemsworth’s vibe as Dementus, a charismatic wasteland warlord who rides a three motorcycle-powered chariot like he’s in Ben-Hur, and whose goons kidnap Furiosa from her home, the fabled Green Place, when she’s just a child. In the first and simplest of the half-dozen masterfully staged set pieces with which Miller punctuates the film, Furiosa’s mom, played by Charlee Fraser, pursues these motorbike-riding raiders on horseback, determined to rescue her daughter and kill her abductors before they can reveal the location of the “place of abundance” where the Vuvalini, Furiosa’s people, attempt to preserve some semblance of civilization. 

Actor Alyla Browne (b. 2009) is fully persuasive as the preadolescent Furiosa; we’re a full hour into the film before Anya Taylor–Joy (b. 1996) makes her entrance as the adult version of the character. By this point, Furiosa, like so many Shakespearean heroines before her, is passing herself off as a man to avoid unwanted attention. (As in Fury Road, sexual violence is a major thematic element here, but it’s implied rather than explicitly shown—more evidence of how Miller has evolved since he made the first couple of these in the late ’70s and early ’80s.) In a chapter—there are individually titled chapters in this movie—called “The Stowaway to Nowhere,” we meet Furiosa in action, tethered to the underside of a “war rig,” like the one she’ll eventually drive, performing mid-battle repairs and repelling attackers. Only after the close of this 15-minute rolling combat sequence, wherein enemies attack the truck from paragliders, does Taylor-Joy speak.

There’s a more complex trigonometry of allegiances here than in prior entries. Miller spends a lot of time on the cycles of war and diplomacy between Dementus’ gang and that of Immortan Joe, the water-hoarding, Citadel-dwelling despot Furiosa rebelled against in Fury Road. (Lachy Hulme takes over the role from Hugh Keays–Byrne, who died in 2020.) This stuff isn’t boring, but it’s a shift away from the mythic quality that’s always been a strength of this series. In prior installments, Max was the only constant; the films even seemed to be told through the recollections of different historians of the no-longer-distant future, where literacy is a luxury and the oral tradition dominates. But Furiosa brings back all the key locations and most of the characters from Fury Road: Gas Town and the Bullet Farm are each the site of major sequences. There’s John Howard as The People Eater, one of Immortan Joe’s advisers, and Nathan Jones as Rictus Erectus, one of Immortan Joe’s sons. Josh Helman, who played a War Boy in Fury Road, returns in a different role, as one of Joe’s sons, Scrotus. Credit Miller and co-screenwriter Nick Lathouris (another Fury Road alum) for having a great ear for exotic character names, among their other skills.

When Furiosa at last has her opportunity to avenge her own abduction and the death of so many of her loved ones at the hands of Dementus, the scene satisfies not through the false catharsis of bloodletting, but through complexity. When Furiosa tells the man who stole her from her family and prematurely ended her childhood, “I want them back,” she’s aware of the impossibility. “I’ve got a fiendishly high pain threshold,” Dementus says, which sounds like a prerequisite for surviving even a day in this fallen world.

It’s an elegant denouement, and then Miller wobbles a bit in the final minute, binding the finale of this thrilling entry too tightly to the start of Fury Road. The end credits are even intercut with clips from the 2015 film, a clumsy postscript that retroactively drains Furiosa of some of its individuality. Fortunately, it’s got plenty to spare. Miller’s imagination, as illuminated by the many returning collaborators who won Oscars for Fury Road—costume designer Jenny Beavan, production designer Colin Gibson, editor (and Miller’s spouse) Margaret Sixel, and hair and makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt—is a place of abundance.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (R, 148 minutes) opens at area theaters today.