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Dreamy, slow-paced mystery/drama involving girl school's outing in turn-of-the-century Australia. Art-house smash is a must-see for fans of offbeat fare who don't mind coming away with more questions than answers.

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Peter Weir's haunting and evocative mystery is set in the Australia of 1900, a mystical place where the British have attempted to impose their Christian culture with such tweedy refinements as a girls' boarding school.

Three students and a school teacher disappear on an excursion to Hanging Rock, in Victoria, on Valentine's Day, 1900. Widely (and incorrectly) regarded as being based on a true story, the movie follows those that disappeared, and those that stayed behind, but it delights in the asking of questions, not the answering of them. - Cinema Montreal

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Set in turn of the century Australia, picnic at hanging rock dramatizes the unexplainable, almost supernatural disappearance of three girls and a teacher while on a school picnic.

The boarding school seems a Victorian oasis of all things proper, but beneath the facade, pupils and schoolmistresses yearn with unfulfilled desires. stepping into the sun drenched outback and falling under its primitive spell, one group climbs a tower of treacherous rocks as if called away from their repressive life.

Ravishing cinematography juxtaposing linens and lace with the ancient, bug-infested bush hypnotizes viewers into the same sinister trance. re-cut after more than 20 years, this version presents peter weir's masterpiece as he intended it.

Peter Weir's much-loved 1975 film adaptation of Joan Lindsay's mystery novel was recently re-cut into a longer director's edition. The classic period setting of a 19th-century girls' school near Victoria's Hanging Rock is populated by familiar faces of Australian stage and screen, including Helen Morse, Jackie Weaver and Garry McDonald. The face that will always be associated with this film is the angelic Anne-Louise Lambert as Miranda, one of the schoolgirls who mysteriously disappear.

The languid, other-worldy mood of this film is one of its greatest achievements, as is the haunting score that includes familiar classical compositions and the original pan flute theme that is some of the most familiar music in Australian cinema. -Trish Maunder

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When it comes to bringing a pantheistic glamour to red dust and grey-green eucalyptus, there's no film like it. Together, Gheorge Zamfir's panpipes and Russell Boyd's back-lit landscapes lift the bush up out of the embrace of the balladeers and set it down in the never never land of romantic allegory, where you're invited to let your imagination splash about as uninhibitedly as it likes. The joy of diving for clues is what is meant by those who've called Picnic not just a film, but an experience. Sandra Hall, The Sydney Morning Herald, December 1999 (City Search Australia)