Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

Max Rockatansky is now Tom Hardy, and the character has transcended those who played the role played before. Now he’s a legend, a man who can walk into the dust and fog of the desert to disappear until he’s needed again.

Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) may be the same level of hero as him, more legend than reality, someone who can lose her arm and remain just as deadly.

Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) is one of the warlords keeping this world together, supplying water while using the women of it to continually repopulate his army.

Soon, Max and Furiosa have a truck filled with five of Immortan Joe’s wives — The Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Toast the Knowing (Zoë Kravitz), Capable (Riley Keough), The Dag (Abbey Lee) and Cheedo the Fragile (Courtney Eaton) — away from Gas Land and toward a promised secret place where seeds still grow. Women aren’t used as baby factories.

Made as a continuous chase and originally storyboarded with 3,500 frames, this is another example of George Miller taking the expected and making something significantly better. A near-Western on wheels with a gigantic War Rig, Bux (Nicholas Hought) and the War Boys who are willing to die in battle to find Valhalla, women discovering their power and an expansion of the world of Mad Max while still having time for vehicles that have blind heavy metal guitar players on them rocking out in the middle of combat, this feels like a gigantic cartoon, one that explodes all over the screen, a movie I’ve watched so many times and never get tired of.

Isn’t it amazing that the fourth movie in a series, one made after hundreds of rip-offs came in its wake, may be the best one?