Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

The film is a beautifully shot, haunted, and haunting movie and a classic example of the power of suggestiveness, elusiveness, and understatement. It helped initiate the first wave of interest in Australian moviemaking and is a peerless mystery in the truest sense of the word.

Peter Weir’s 1975 film is a classic of the Australian new wave cinema, a supernatural parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria that remains dazzling on its 50th anniversary re-release. The critic singles out its sun-stricken hallucinatory strangeness and the way it affects the manner of a true-crime cold case around an unknowable enigma at the rock.

Weir's film creates a haunting mystery around the unexplained disappearance of schoolgirls and a teacher on a picnic, evoking buried terror and repressed sexuality in a lush Australian landscape. Ebert praises its deliberate inconclusiveness and hypnotic, enigmatic quality over any tidy resolution.

The critic calls it a haunting and compelling oddity from Peter Weir, part mystery, part horror, and an impressionist poem to lost innocence. The sumptuous and captivating cinematography by Russell Boyd is singled out for praise, along with the film's emphasis on nature's alien quality and its refusal to provide straightforward answers.

Weir's director's cut revival is exquisite and seductive, showcasing masterful mood and suggestiveness with the rock as a brooding presence and the story's erotic symbolism. Thomas calls it a gorgeous-looking, superbly wrought enigma that helped revive Australian cinema.

The restored 1975 film is a national treasure epitomizing the 'outback uncanny,' with its tale of girls and a teacher vanishing from a prehistoric rock formation amid Victorian propriety. Hoberman highlights its quasi-supernatural atmosphere and status as Australia's greatest movie.

The film became a breakthrough for Australian cinema with its poetic mood and sumptuous cinematography. It revolves around the unexplained disappearance of schoolgirls at the rock, evoking ancestral ghosts and the tension between Victorian attitudes and the rugged landscape.

Desire as persistent and intense as the sunshine on a bright summer day teases out madness in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. The power of nature is quiet but all-consuming in this unclassifiable work, which Criterion gives an astonishing A/V transfer.

The critic praises Weir's graceful adaptation for capturing the book's mysterious and frustrating spirit along with its magical atmosphere rooted in aboriginal Dreamtime traditions. They single out the exploration of adolescent tensions, sensuality, and repression at the all-girls school as a key strength.