Australia

In the first half, Luhrmann tells the story with gusto, passionately and fully applying his almost grotesque sense of humour (which I like and which his previous film, Moulin Rouge, was packed with), but when he arrives in Darwin midway through the film, he seems to wave a magic wand, and the narrative, full of life and the enchanting atmosphere of the Australian outback, becomes a game of playing with the audience's patience, where it's as if the filmmakers are trying to see what clichés and screenwriting gimmicks they can get away with. That cheesy ending is something that not even Danielle Steele, the queen of rosy books, would dare write. Still, I sense Luhrmann's sincere effort to pay homage to his beloved native Australia throughout the work, and so I can't entirely damn it. (08/03/2009)

A fairy tale about how a dog and a cat cooked up a movie. After regularly encountering the immeasurable power of passion in Into the Beat and after some time away from Moulin Rouge!, which I eventually accepted, I was expecting a lot from Australia. However, the result is... something I'm willing to close both eyes to just for the prosaic fact that Nicole looks immeasurably great after 1939. Which isn't much, but also not too little for moving pictures. (23/07/2011)

Kitschy silliness that for two and a half hours smothers smart viewers in digital cattle, while pulling the more sensitive viewers by the nose with a stupid love story between an English lady and an Australian cowboy. Jackman is alright, Kidman is too vague at times, but the fundamental problem is, of course, the script. If told you that the twists are all predictable half an hour before they happen, I’d be lying, they are predictable already from the trailer, even before the film begins. Think about the most clichéd romance you can imagine, set it in Australia during WWII, add some bollocks about the importance of the art of storytelling (this is how ridiculous this movie sounds!) and you have Australia. (19/05/2009)

It begins like an unfunny, madcap comedy (all praise to those kangaroos), then it suddenly turns into rather a good adventure fantasy movie about hunters with magic and a nice amount of tongue in cheek, but then subsequently flops over into a remake of Pearl Harbor. Just even stupider and deadly serious into the bargain. At the end it becomes a politically correct appeal with at least seventeen ending acts. The cherry on the cake is the finale “gets out of boat and rifle shot" which easily wins the prize for sky-high dumbness in the movie theaters this year. Of course, you shed some tears while watching it, which certainly was the filmmakers’ aim, but I’m not so sure that they were meant to be tears of laughter. It’s all in a visual guise which, unlike Moulin Rouge!, doesn’t balance playfully on the line between kitsch and genius, but becomes puke-worthy digital kitsch of the third kind. The characters (not the actors - they do their very best to save things) are a parody of themselves, because for instance every ten minutes Sarah turns into a different character, thinking, acting and behaving completely differently to before. A movie about strength and the need to tell a story that doesn’t have a clue about how to tell a story is bound to fail. And it does. (18/12/2008)

Australia is a theatrical, affected overly sweet monstrosity that decides anew what it is about every half an hour. In order to hold itself together, it relies on the relationship of the central couple, which is, however, drier than Australian desert. I haven’t suffered like this in a theater for a long time and I can’t believe that this suffering was brought by the same Baz Luhrmann whose beautiful, emotional and complex Moulin Rouge! I love with all my heart. I’m giving this the second star only for the poetic story line with the little Aboriginal boy and the only really nice scene in the film, which is connected to him (stopping the cattle just before the abyss). Australia deserved its fate as a box-office bomb. (09/01/2009)