GENIUS IN A BOTTLE

George Miller’s new film blends magical ingredients into an imperfect potion.

- Esther Zuckerman

The easy formulas of most blockbusters have never appealed to the Australian director George Miller. His films can be deceptively simple yet are frequently bizarre; often nightmarish, they can turn surprisingly sentimental.

One constant, however, is that they overflow with a creative energy that’s rare when box offices are awash in superhero chum. Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road turned a two-hour chase through a dystopian desert into a car-fueled symphony, transforming a dormant franchise into an Oscar-winning $375 million global smash.

Miller wrote and produced the beloved family hit Babe, then turned its sequel into a haunting underworld adventure. His tap-dancing penguin Happy Feet movies made more than $500 million and offered a climate change warning buried in cute animal plots. Now, with his first feature since 2015, he’s made another movie that defies easy categorization.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (Aug. 26) is a hotel room romance that also happens to be a CGI spectacle, starring a giant Idris Elba and a buttoned-up Tilda Swinton. Based on the 1994 short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by English novelist A.S. Byatt, it’s unlikely to match the financial success of Miller’s other work, but it still confirms his status as the wild genius of pop cinema.