Peter Weir's latest - the word is good

A.O. Scott, of the New York Times, on Peter Weir's The Way Back, which has just premiered at the Telluride Filmfest in Colorado :

"The Australian director Peter Weir...has frequently shown a reverence for the beauties and terrors of nature, going back to early films like “The Last Wave” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” in which the topography of his native country assumes a haunting, even demonic presence. The drama of human beings confronting the elemental power of nature figures in later work like “The Mosquito Coast” and “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” and also in his latest movie, “The Way Back.”



"Compared to (Danny) Boyle’s, Mr. Weir’s style is stately, almost classical, and the astonishing story he has to tell in the new movie — about a group of men who escaped from a Soviet Labor camp in 1941 and walked from Siberia to India — has an old-fashioned gravity and grandeur. There are fine performances from Ed Harris, Sioarse Ronan and Jim Sturgess as Januzs, the Polish prisoner who leads the trek toward freedom, and breathtaking images of tundra, desert forest and grassland."