100
Empire by Kim Newman
It's a deep film, but also elusive, accepting that some mysteries can never be solved.
Walkabout
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- United Kingdom,
- Australia
- 1971
- · 95m
Director
Nicolas Roeg
Cast
Jenny Agutter,
Luc Roeg,
David Gulpilil,
John Meillon,
Robert McDarra,
Peter Carver
Genre
Adventure,
Drama
Two city-bred children are saved by an Aboriginal boy when they escape from their father, who intended to kill them in the Australian outback. As they travel together in the wilderness, the film highlights the discord between nature and modern life, and the feeling of being lost no matter where you are.
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What are critics saying?
100
The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps
Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world.
100
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Walkabout is a superb work of storytelling and its material is effortlessly fascinating.
100
Paste Magazine by Andy Beta
It’s a commentary on unresolvable conflicts between races, cultures, generations, sexes; a vision that is at once primal and sophisticated. When the film circles back at the coda, we realize we’ve just traversed a brutal—yet flawless—cinematic landscape.
100
TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)
One of the most original, visually stunning, and provocative films of the 1970s, Walkabout is timeless in its beauty and unique approach to a classic coming-of-age story. The film is arguably director Nicolas Roeg's finest achievement.
100
Chicago Tribune by John Petrakis
The transition from cinematographer to director can be a bumpy ride, but few have navigated it as well as British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg. [08 Mar 2002, p.C6]
100
USA Today by Mike Clark
With gorgeous Australian outback photography and minimal dialogue co-defining it as "pure" cinema, Nicolas Roeg's masterpiece was once designated by Premiere magazine as its "most wanted" movie on video. [04 Apr 1997, p.3D]
91
Entertainment Weekly by Chris Nashawaty
Nicolas Roeg’s art-house adventure is lyrical and intoxicating.
90
The Guardian by Luke Buckmaster
Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land.
80
Village Voice
A richly picturesque, multi-leveled film. [20 May 1971, p.66]
80
Village Voice by Kenneth Geist
A richly picturesque, multi-leveled film. [20 May 1971, p.66]
75
Slant Magazine by Ed Gonzalez
Roeg shoots every figure in the film like an instructional visual subject, and it levels the philosophical playing field—whether man, or ant, or echidna, or gnarled tree stump, they’re all fodder for the experimental interplay of light, shadow, and space.
75
San Francisco Chronicle by Edward Guthmann
A strange, vivid tale of two British schoolchildren stranded in the deserts of the outback.
75
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
For the most part, Walkabout is an involving, occasionally hypnotic, motion picture. Some of the photography, including images of the outback and its denizens, is spectacular.
67
Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten
Roeg's points about the contrasts between noble savages and civilized effetes don't stand up terribly well over time.
40
Time
Roeg and his scenarist Edward Bond (BlowUp) aim for the mind and miss wildly. Their preachy, anti-intellectual Natural Mannerisms are neither convincing nor new.
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