Between 'Mad Max' installments, George Miller looks at love in uneven 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' | Movie review

Aug. 23—Those eager for a furious follow-up from writer-director George Miller to his 2015 acclaimed visceral action film "Mad Max: Fury Road" will have to keep waiting.

The father of the "Mad Max" franchise not only hasn't rushed back to its post-apocalyptic world, but he hasn't seemed to be in a hurry to get back to movie-making in general.

He is back now, however, with a meditation on love and desire, "Three Thousand Years of Longing."

Things — not all that good but also not all that bad — come in threes in the film, which stars Tilda Swinton (the "Chronicles of Narnia" films, "Doctor Strange") as an expert on storytelling and Idris Elba ("Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom" and the just-released "Beast") as a magical creature very insistent on granting her a trio of wishes.

Swinton's Dr. Alithea Binnie is a narratologist, and she is visiting Istanbul for a conference. She clearly has a link to otherworldly entities, as she first encounters a strange little, um, man at the airport.

"He was hot to the touch," she tells colleagues. "Musky."

(Well, look, airports — what are you gonna do?)

Then, while speaking at the conference, she has an encounter with a ghostly presence — who apparently only she can see — and loses consciousness for a bit.

She returns to her hotel room after stopping in a shop, where she had purchased a glass bottle from the bottom of a pile of them. Living within the bottle, she soon discovers, is a djinn (Elba), who is given no name other than "Djinn" and will be referred to as such for our purposes.

At first, he is a giant, barely fitting inside the walls of her spacious suite and holding the power to pull Albert Einstein from archival footage being shown on the television into the room, if she'd like that. (She wouldn't.)

Soon, though, he shrinks down and, like her, lounges about the room in a bathrobe. She has freed him from the bottle, but to truly be free, he tells her, he must grant her three wishes. There are certain rules — a wish can't be for more wishes, for example — but he is very powerful and can make many yearnings come true.

However, she is acutely aware that stories involving genie-like figures, bottles and the granting of wishes tend to be tales of the cautionary variety. Thus, she is content to go along just as she has been, living what generally is a solitary-but-satisfactory existence.

This is a problem for him, and in an attempt to change her mind, he tells her three stories from his thousands of years of life, in which he admits to being too fond of being in the company of women.

None of these is all that engrossing, although the first, involving the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum) and King Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad), comes the closest to captivating. The middle yarn is a convoluted saga not worth explaining. And the final one, in which Djinn falls in love with a young brilliant woman, Zefir (Burcu Golgedar), who's held captive by her much older husband, is a little intriguing — but only a little.

Miller co-wrote the screenplay with Augusta Gore. It is an adaptation of "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eyes," a 1994 story by British author A.S. Byatt to which Miller's production company has owned the rights since the late '90s. (For what it's worth, "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eyes" apparently involves five tales.)

"Three Thousand Years of Longing" is at its best at its most simple, when we get two terrific actors, Swinton and Elba, together, their characters conversing casually and sharing almost-immediate respect for one another.

As a result, you become at least somewhat invested in whether Alithea will make wishes — you suspect she will — and what it will mean for her if she does give in to Djinn's pressure to do so.

Not surprisingly, given that this is a film from Miller, "Longing" is consistently visually interesting, with fine work in design areas including production (Roger Ford) and costumes (Kym Barrett).

"Three Thousand Years of Longing" is a mediocre time-passer that's something a bit different for Miller, who, to be fair, is more than "Mad Max," with directorial credits that include "The Witches of Eastwick," "Lorenzo's Oil" and "Happy Feat."

And fear not, "Mad Max" lovers. "Furiosa" — Miller's prequel to "Fury Road" with terrific actress Anya Taylor-Joy in the namesake role originally played by Charlize Theron — is set for theaters in 2024.

Your wish is his command.

'Three Thousand Years of Longing'

Where: Theaters.

When: Aug. 26.

Rated: R for some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence.

Runtime: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.