The Movie of the Year Is Here

Sometimes when a veteran filmmaker finally gets around to making a project that they’ve dreamed of doing for decades, the resulting film can be an overcooked mess, all that time spent inside its creator’s brain leaving it a jumble of incoherent if fascinating ideas. (A recent example that springs to mind is Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.) But there are other, rarer occasions when a long-evolving project gets exactly the time in the oven that it needed. (An example here might be George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.) Only after the filmmaker in question has amassed a career’s worth of experience making work across multiple genres, found enough success and acclaim within the industry to command large budgets and to work with any actor they want, and established a core team of trusted creative collaborators can they truly realize a dream that even a few years before was more like a vision board than a feasible plan.