One Category at a Time: Director

In the Academy's 88 years, only a couple of filmmakers have won back-to-back Best Director Oscars; John Ford in the 40s and Joseph L. Mankiewicz in the 50s. Since then... Not even close. But that all looks to change this year.

My Award Nominations: Director

My final official nominee announcement this year is Best Director. Rather than similarly highlighting just my five Best Picture nominees, I'll be publishing my top 20 pics of the year in two lists on Tuesday and Wednesday. But for now, the five helmers whose storytelling most impressed me in 2015:

Review - Mad Max: Fury Road

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world. Max is just living in it. Well, existing in it.
By his own admission, survival is the one instinct that he – the last sane man in a world gone crazy – has been reduced to as he wanders through the post-
apocalyptic Wasteland in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth in a film series that hasn't revved its engines since 1985.

The real madman is producer-writer-director George Miller. Mad for deciding to pull his long dormant road warrior out of retirement 30 years beyond Thunderdome; Mad for conceiving the sort of world that heretofore could only have existed in a truck-driving anarchist's worst acid trips; And finally, mad for pulling it off with the sheer mind-shredding gusto that filmmakers half his age (he recently turned 70) consistently struggle to inject into modern action movies.

Best not to stand up after seeing this one. It'll melt your bones from the inside.