Mad max

The new Mad Max film is a betrayal of everything that made Fury Road so good

Action films are boring. This isn’t really an opinion, it’s just demonstrably true. Try it for yourself: put on any high-octane, orange-and-teal action movie from the last 15 years and see how long it takes before you start automatically fiddling around with your phone. I can usually make it about five minutes. This is weird. I can deal with all the incredibly sedate cinematic vegetables just fine, but as soon as there are gunfights or chases involved I get distracted. I think I know why. The real betrayal of this Mad Max sequel is that it’s full of talking Action directors know that they’re competing with the sensory equivalent of

In defence of panic buying

The filling station on the road out of the village was like a scene from Mad Max. People were all but jumping on top of the petrol tanker that had pulled in to unload its bounty. As desperate drivers screamed and shouted, it wasn’t so hard to imagine them swinging from the doors of the cab, attempting to hijack it, while the driver inside beat them away with the end of a sawn-off shotgun. The forecourt was a seething mass of screeching people on the verge of savagery, not so different from the Thunderdome. After a while, I noticed that everyone was fighting over the same four pumps while two