Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

Essential, and if you only watch one of the first three, watch this. Almost every visual convention of the post-apocalyptic genre was either invented here or made famous here: the scavenged leather, the sports padding worn as armour, the fuel economy, the modified V8s, the mohawks, the fortified compound under siege by people who look like a tribe assembled from a scrapyard.

Max barely speaks. He has perhaps sixteen lines, and the film opens with a narrator telling his story as something already in the past, which is where the series' idea of Max as a legend rather than a character begins. He arrives into somebody else's conflict, is self-interested throughout, helps for payment, and leaves with nothing. The one line of dialogue everybody remembers is a negotiation.

The last twenty minutes are one continuous chase involving a tanker, and it is still among the best action sequences ever filmed. It is almost entirely practical, shot on real roads at real speed, and it is legible at every moment: you always know where every vehicle is in relation to every other, which is a skill most modern action films have lost.

Ninety-six minutes, no fat, no exposition, and an ending that reframes the whole film in one line of narration. It is the template, and it has not been improved on by anyone except Miller himself.