Sure, the late Russian director Aleksei German’s black-and-white sci-fi plunge into a squalid medieval hellscape is a uniquely punishing experience: a two-and-a-half-hour fecal slog that turns the viewer into a frustrated, ineffectual passive spectator of humankind at its least redeemable — suggesting this is what it’s like to be a god (or God). But only one other movie this year rivals it as a sustained, staggering, beyond-obsessive vision: George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s exactly the kind of rarity we’ll miss when The Belcourt goes into its six-month hibernation in January.
