There's no faulting Baz Luhrmann's ambition: this old-fashioned, $130 million epic romantic adventure was intended as his Gone with the Wind. At the start of the Second World War, Nicole Kidman's hoity-toity English lady arrives in Australia to confront a husband she believes is being unfaithful. The stunning vistas of northern Australia provide built-in visual splendour, and the spit-and-sawdust world of cattle ranching is personified by Hugh Jackman's cross between Indiana Jones and "Crocodile" Dundee. Unfortunately the action, built around a feud about land ownership and Kidman and Jackman's on-off affair, veers from melodramatic to plain silly. Luhrmann attempts to weld a screwball comedy to a romance, a western and a war movie, while not patronising the Aborigines (which Luhrmann seeks to sanctify in a subplot involving an orphaned half-Aboriginal, half-white child that Kidman befriends) - aiming for camp excess while demanding that we take the film seriously - but is defeated by the task. One day it may become a cult classic, but for now, Australia is really his Pearl Harbor.

Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces firsthand.