Picnic at Hanging Rock

The schoolgirls who disappeared on Valentine’s Day, 1900, the girls they left behind, a lesbian orphan among them, and the schoolmistress who went with them.

A Victorian mystery, down under.

Critics...

The Last Wave

The first scene of desert schoolchildren pelted by heavy rain and hail on a cloudless day certainly recalls Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The main body of the film is intertwined with DeMille’s later The Ten Commandments, especially the plagues and the Red Sea but also Moses and Aaron at the court of Pharaoh.

The last scenes unmistakably evoke Reed’s The Third Man. Here, the South American character of the temple under the city is manifest.

Gallipoli

A salutary explication of Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, since at the time it could not be understood by critics at all.

The Year of Living Dangerously

This is a complicated account or reckoning of accounts, or, if you prefer, a joke on Luke 3:10, cited in the film (“And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then?”). From that point of view, the beauty is in the long strands of narrative exposition as the disaster unfolds.

Taken more seriously, Weir shows that he is very easy with sidebars and ambience. In a few short seconds, his hotshot foreign correspondents are revealed as camp followers, a quick look tells a long story, the interior of a car on a very rainy day is what is known as a genre picture of various textures and aerial perspectives, in technical terms.