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Mad Max (1979)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
Made for about A$400,000 and shot in and around Melbourne, this is where the whole wasteland began, though it is really a revenge thriller on decaying highways rather than the desert epic people picture. Miller had worked in a hospital emergency room and seen the crash injuries the film depicts, and that firsthand knowledge gives the road violence a sickening weight. A young Mel Gibson is all coiled stillness as Max. It earned over US$100 million worldwide and held the Guinness record for box office against budget for two decades, which tells you how hungry audiences were for this kind of speed.
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Mad Max 2 (1981)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Known in the US as The Road Warrior, this is the film that invented the look every post-apocalypse movie has borrowed since: leather, scavenged cars, a fuel compound under siege in the outback near Broken Hill. Miller drew on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and you can feel it in how Max becomes a legend told by someone else. The closing tanker chase is the one to watch for, a sustained run of real vehicles and real stunts that set the bar Fury Road would later try to clear. If you only know Fury Road, this is the direct ancestor.
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Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
6.4/10on IMDb
Released
Miller's segment: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"
This four-part anthology closes with Miller's remake of the classic episode, with John Lithgow as a terrified airline passenger who sees something on the wing in a storm. It runs only a short stretch of the film, yet it is pure Miller: a confined space, mounting panic and a camera that never stops moving. It is the quickest way to see that his talent for momentum works just as well inside an airplane cabin as on an open road.
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Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
6.2/10on IMDb
Released
Miller co-directed this third Max film with George Ogilvie, the first made without his producing partner Byron Kennedy, who died in a helicopter crash in 1983. It is the oddball of the series: Tina Turner rules Bartertown as Aunty Entity, the Thunderdome cage fight is one of the great action set pieces of the 1980s, and the second half turns into a fable about a tribe of lost children. Fans who want pure road fury often rank it last, but it is the clearest early sign of the mythmaker and the softer storyteller who would later make Babe: Pig in the City.
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The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
A Hollywood comedy about the devil seems a long way from the outback, but Miller brings the same physical energy to John Updike's story of three bored small-town women and the charming stranger they conjure. Jack Nicholson plays Daryl Van Horne at full volume, and Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer give the witches real wit and warmth. John Williams earned an Oscar nomination for the playful score. Watch it to see Miller handle star actors and broad comedy, and for a finale where he lets the supernatural mayhem go as big as any car wreck.
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Lorenzo's Oil (1992)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
This is the film where Miller's medical training matters most. It tells the true story of Augusto and Michaela Odone, played by Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon, who taught themselves the science of their son Lorenzo's rare disease, adrenoleukodystrophy, when doctors had little to offer. Miller treats lab work and library research with the urgency of a chase, and Sarandon's ferocious performance earned a Best Actress nomination, alongside a screenplay nomination for Miller and Nick Enright. It is harrowing and demanding, so save it for a night when you want to be moved rather than thrilled.
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Babe: Pig in the City (1998)
5.9/10on IMDb
Released
Chris Noonan directed Babe, but Miller took the reins for the sequel and made something stranger and braver: a talking-pig movie with a dark, dreamlike city, real peril and a streak of melancholy. It disappointed at the box office and some reviewers warned it was too dark for small children, yet Gene Siskel named it the best movie of 1998, and its reputation has climbed ever since. The Randy Newman song "That'll Do" was nominated for an Oscar. For anyone who loves Fury Road, the surprise is how much the two films share: a hero who protects the vulnerable and set pieces that build like clockwork.
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Happy Feet (2006)
6.4/10on IMDb
Released
Miller won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature for this musical about Mumble, an emperor penguin voiced by Elijah Wood who cannot sing but can tap dance. The dances were performed by real dancers through motion capture, with Savion Glover supplying Mumble's feet, which is why the movement feels so alive. Beneath the jukebox songs there is a pointed story about overfishing in Antarctica, a dimension Miller said any story about penguins had to include. It is the easiest Miller film to share with kids, and the big dance numbers are choreographed with the same precision as his chases.
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Happy Feet Two (2011)
5.8/10on IMDb
Released
The weakest-reviewed film here, and worth knowing about mainly for completeness and for one inspired idea: a side story about two tiny krill, voiced by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, who decide to leave the swarm. The main plot about Mumble's son is thinner than the first film, and critics were split. Its aftermath led to the closure of Miller's Sydney animation studio, Dr. D Studios. Watch it with young fans of the original rather than on its own merits.
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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
After years in development, Miller came back to the wasteland with what is essentially one long chase, built so it would read as a silent movie. Editor Margaret Sixel has said they cut silently for a long time, without temp music, apart from the dialogue scenes, so every image had to tell the story on its own. Tom Hardy is Max, but Charlize Theron's Furiosa is its real heart, and the stunts were staged with real vehicles in the Namibian desert. It earned ten Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won six, more than any other film that year. If this is your favorite, everything else on the list is a branch of the same tree.
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Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
The most personal and least seen film here: Tilda Swinton plays a British scholar of storytelling who frees a djinn, played by Idris Elba, on a trip to Istanbul, and he tries to win her three wishes by telling her the tales of his past. Adapted from A. S. Byatt's story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," it is Miller's love letter to myth itself, the subject that runs through the Mad Max films too. It flopped at the box office, so many Fury Road fans missed it. Come for the lavish storybook images and stay for an unexpectedly gentle romance between two lonely beings.
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
Miller's prequel to Fury Road tells Furiosa's story across roughly fifteen years, from the girl taken from the Green Place, played by Alyla Browne, to the hardened warrior played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Chris Hemsworth is a gleefully unhinged warlord as Dementus, and the raid on the War Rig, which took 78 days to shoot, is as good as anything in the series. It is slower and more of a sprawling saga than Fury Road's single breathless chase, and in theaters it grossed little more than its budget. Watch it right before Fury Road and the two play as one long legend.
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