Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Skippable, and the context explains the film better than any review of it does. Byron Kennedy, Miller's producing partner and closest collaborator since film school, was killed in a helicopter crash while scouting for this production. Miller took on a co-director, George Ogilvie, for the dramatic scenes and directed the action himself, and the result is visibly two films that do not fully meet.

The first half is excellent. Bartertown is the best piece of world-building in the series: a functioning settlement powered by methane from pig waste, with a political arrangement between the woman who owns the surface and the man who runs the energy supply, and a legal system consisting of a duel in a cage. Tina Turner plays Aunty Entity as a politician rather than a warlord. The Thunderdome sequence is genuinely great.

The second half is a different, softer film about a tribe of feral children waiting for a saviour, told in invented dialect, with Max in the Messiah role the previous two films refused to give him. It is aimed at a younger audience, it slackens badly, and the final chase is a weaker restaging of the tanker sequence.

Nothing requires it. Watch it third if you loved the first two and want the whole picture, and expect roughly half a great film.