Idris Elba

For the casual moviegoer unconcerned by matters of auteurship, it can still come as something of a shock to learn that the person behind the original Mad Max trilogy (1979–85), as well as its decade-defining follow-up, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), also brought us the madcap animal antics of Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and the all-singing, all-dancing penguin colony of Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet 2 (2011). George Miller has one of the most eclectic oeuvres in modern cinema, but all his films are defined by a rich, seemingly limitless vein of imagination, as well as by the technical and aesthetic mastery necessary to mine it. Whether dabbling in live-action or 3D animation – whether wrangling penguins, pigs, or eighteen-wheeler ‘War Rigs’ – Miller is a storyteller first and foremost. It stands to reason that his latest film is a story about stories themselves: where they come from, what they mean to us, and what their place is (if any) in the modern world.