Wonderful character development!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Baz Luhrmann's epic film is gorgeous to look at with Australia's superstars Nicole & Jackman at their peak-best. Forget the knockers - this is a quality film, although flawed, it is hugely entertaining and emotionally connecting

Okay, so I can't understand why there are so many bad reviews. So I had just gotten Fios, after Charter crapped the bed, and this movie was on. I didn't think I'd like it, but Hugh Jackman is in it, need I say more? Well, when I first watched it, I thought it was going to be a silly comedy; from the cover it was a romance so I'm like ooh, okay a romantic comedy. It turned to be something so much more. I loved how Nicole aka Sarah turned from a rich woman with her nose up in the air to more humble. And the spark between Nicole and Hugh...oh my....okay, so I'm a hopeless romantic and the war, my heart strings. When he thought she was dead and how devastated he was....I was just....my heart imploded. Clearly, this movie isn't for everyone, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. It didn't hurt that Hugh went back to his natural roots and the Australian accent....my ovaries exploded hahah it certainly seems this movie may have a larger female audience. But in all seriousness, I loved it.

A cowboy movie in almost all respects except scenery and lingo. (How do you say "vaquero" in the language of the Yir Yuront?) Unlike most cowboy movies it's hard to assess because it's really two movies sitting uneasily side by side. The first movie is DEFINITELY cowboy move. It has a lot of cows. Fifteen hundred head, reckons the expert drover, handsome, robust, dusty Hugh Jackman. A "drover" in 1940 Australia is just a plain old cowboy. He don't fancy sittin' in the big house and foolin' around with figures and such. He likes to be out there where a man can be independent and can breath fresh clean air -- if you don't count cow flops.Nicole Kidman, thoroughly unglamorized, is the new owner of Faraway Downs, a remote ranch that has entered a barren stretch,. She arrives fresh from England, all proper and prim and prejudiced. The American West had its Indians. The outback has its aborigines. She is gradually assimilated into the ways of the Antipodes and when her cheating foreman deserts her with all his hands, she gathers the Blackfellas together with Hugh Jackman and a philosophical drunk, the bags under whose eyes would inflate during a collision, and drives those 1500 head all the way up to Darwin, beating out the mean guy who runs the cattle business hereabouts, King Carney. King Carney is Bryan Brown, known to many through the "F/X" movies, now playing a grizzled monarch of all he surveys. Frankly, I missed Chips Rafferty, a whole generation's go-to Australian sidekick and guide.The score ranges from period renditions of Jerry Gary's famous arrangement of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" to Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." The landscape is epic. I love Australia and Aussies. The men outside the cities are into beer and sports. That's enough for me. But nothing else is epic in any sense. The writers have missed no opportunity for heroism and sentimentality in their most uncooked form. That drunken wise fool? Any experienced viewer has him pegged as toast, if not from his very introduction then most certainly after he befriends the cute little half-caste boy with the big black eyes and the belief in magic. The first movie ends more or less happily, a few deaths along the way not counting for very much, when Faraway Downs' functionality is restored, and Jackman and Kidman wind up in each others' arms and the cute little half-caste sits playing a harmonica in the moonlight.Then the second movie begins and it's darker in tone. Jackman, rather too quickly, is overcome by a yearning for the wide-open spaces again and takes off working on a six-month cattle drive for some other ranch. Jackman once had a wife, an aborigine, who was killed because she was an aborigine. Now we are introduced to her brother, Jackman's brother-in-law, who bravely puts into words the feelings that the self-contained, manly Jackson can not. The brother-in-law is toast. I'll skip the plot of the second movie except to say that everyone but Jackman is either dead or thought to be dead, until they reappear from bushes, all smiles.It's a long movie, as I said, long enough for two movies actually. It's full of colorful action and stereotypical characters. Once in a while it's good to relax and let an unchallenging and thoroughly familiar narrative run across the screen, even if it leaves behind nothing much more than insubstantial whirls of desert dust that soon settle back to earth and reveal the distant jagged hills and desiccated mud cracks of spaces totally devoid of life.

I personally enjoyed the movie very much. I find it very deep and emotional. It certainly made me weep several time. Excellent actors, fantastic music, the story is very profound and it certainly delivers a very moving message about love, honor and the spirituality of the locals. Beautiful and emotional, i don't really think that it could have been better. This movie is simply brilliant. As far as i am concerned, the critics are the viewers and we all might enjoy it differently. If the viewer enjoys the movie, than it's a good movie. Simple as that.A true masterpiece! It certainly worth the time watching it.