CANNES, France — The last time director George Miller brought a new movie to Cannes was in 2015, when his exhilarating "Mad Max: Fury Road" took the festival by (dust) storm. The movie played outside the main competition, as most Hollywood blockbusters at Cannes do. But as more than one onlooker observed, it felt like unjust treatment for a popular work of art that — in its beauty and kineticism, its political acuity and formal mastery — towered over most of the work vying for the Palme d'Or that year.
When a filmmaker like Miller is at the peak of powers, the distinctions that festivals like Cannes often reinforce — between high and low, art and commerce — simply collapse.
Miller's stature among world auteurs remains undimmed, even if his unusual new offering, "Three Thousand Years of Longing," which premiered out-of-competition Friday night at Cannes (and will hit U.S. theaters in late August), isn't one of his finer efforts. An intimately scaled chamber drama with a cosmic, fantastical overlay, the movie, adapted from A.S. Byatt's short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," spins a fateful encounter between a literary analyst named Alithea (Tilda Swinton) and a millennia-old genie (a pointy-eared, furry-legged Idris Elba). The result is another showcase for Miller's prodigious visual imagination, his deftness at integrating eye-popping visual effects into his storytelling. But in this case, the movie is itself a story about storytelling, which is where its specific problems begin.
