Pictureland

"I used to be a cop," says the man who only very late in the proceedings of Mad Max:  Fury Road, owns that his name is actually Max.  "Fury Road" is a kind of continuation of the Max Max franchise, some thirty years after the third film in the series, "Beyond Thunderdome" came and unceremoniously went.  However, from the first memorable Mad Max film to this most recent, there is a kind of honing of character, from a specific man with a specific job to a near-mythical character roaming, Western fashion, a dusty, post-apocalyptic world.  Not quite a man with no name, but very close. As the Mad Max films have gotten less specific in terms of character and place (most of the desert action here was filmed in Namibia), "Fury Road's" more international cast is fitting.  So too the presence of Englishman Tom Hardy in the role of the eponymous wanderer.  Mr. Hardy's voice has drifted sonorously if a little vaguely all over the globe in r...

"Low hanging fruit," complains Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt) to visiting home town girl - or visiting "psychotic prom queen bitch," depending on your point of view - Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), as the two go about their sparring, if not unlikely friendship in Young Adult , the second collaboration of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody.   This after their wildly successful Juno in 2007. Mavis, going through something of a pre-midlife crisis, has returned to her old stomping grounds of Mercury, Minnesota to reclaim former boyfriend Buddy Slade.  Never mind that Buddy is by all accounts a happily married man, or that his first child has recently appeared on the scene.  In fact, it's the arrival of her old flame's baby, whose picture Mavis retrieves from her e-mail in box one day during a bout of writerly procrastination that ultimately inspires Mavis to jump in her Mini Cooper and speed out of Minneapolis in favor of her hometown, a place Mav...