When [Luhrmann] goes from silly to turgid in 60 seconds flat -- he punctures Australia's proportions down from epic to simply overwrought.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 6, 2018

"Australia" is a shameless-and shamelessly entertaining-pastiche. It works because Luhrmann, a true believer in movie-movie magic, stamps it all with the force of his own extravagant, generous personality.

| Feb 6, 2018

The effect of watching a Baz Luhrmann film is indistinguishable from the effect of having a crater-sized parcel of glitter dropped on your head.

| Jan 29, 2016

| Original Score: B- | Feb 14, 2012

| Original Score: B | May 6, 2011

If you are willing to take the plunge and view things through Luhrmann's prism, Australia does deliver the classic dramatic and romantic satisfactions its ambitious advertising campaign promises.

| Jul 6, 2010

Much like Scorsese's Gangs of New York, it's a film that has been long labored over, and the artist's love of the material is clear, but the inspiration has been lost along the way.

| Original Score: C+ | Mar 17, 2009

Often beautiful but wildly inconsistent, Australia is none more Baz Luhrmann, which perhaps says it all. Worth a look on the big screen, though.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 5, 2009

It's a fine romp, epic in both ambition and visuals if not narrative - and if director Baz Luhrmann had stopped at the end of the love story's trajectory, the audience would have left entirely happy.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Jan 5, 2009

Australia is an epic love story, and a quite extraordinary piece of kitsch. Everything about the film is wildly over the top.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 5, 2009

We are left with slow-moving insincerity and conceit, summoned up in the flatulence of that title: Australia, a country reborn in terms of facetious Hollywood cliches.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 5, 2009

Luhrmann's imagination too, demented and over reaching though it might be, is a glorious and vagrant thing to behold. His passion and romanticism, precisely because it's not trimmed and edited, exhilarates.

| Jan 5, 2009

The photography is a knockout. All Australia needed was a script with a sustained story and a stronger sense of where, and how, tragic drama should take over from camp seriocomedy.

| Jan 5, 2009

Nothing wrong with a film's reach exceeding its grasp, but Luhrmann's ambition has left this one looking forlorn and exposed: Australia clears a huge space for itself and then hasn't the wit or the wherewithal to fill it.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 5, 2009

It's a thoroughly enjoyable romp - the cinematic equivalent of a bath-full of Quality Street.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 5, 2009

Australia is a film for which you have constantly to suspend your disbelief. I did for some of the way, but in the end began to think it was a cross between the plonking Pearl Harbor and an expensive but routine sort of Oz western.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 5, 2009

One wonders if there are any tablecloth cliches about Australia that have been missed.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 3, 2008

Sometimes Luhrmann seems to be living in a Dreamtime of his own; his movie is all over the map. But what a gorgeous map it is.

Full Review | Dec 1, 2008

Luhrmann is drawn to kitsch as inevitably as a bear to honey.

| Dec 1, 2008

It's not the masterpiece we've been waiting for, but Australia is still an ambitious, at times even awesome, movie experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 1, 2008