Blu-ray, DVD Release: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 8, 2014
Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Picnic at Hanging Rock movie scene

A group of young woman mysteriously vanish in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath in the 1975 drama-mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock put director Peter Weir (The Way Back) on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Picnic at Hanging Rock concerns a small group of students from an all-female college and a chaperone, who vanish while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing.

Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.

Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD Combo Edition of the movie includes the following features:

• Remastered high-definition digital film transfer, supervised and approved by director Peter Weir, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Extended interview with Weir
• New piece on the making of the film, featuring interviews from 2003 with executive producer Patricia Lovell, producers Hal McElroy and Jim McElroy, and cast members
• New introduction by film scholar David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film A Recollection . . . Hanging Rock 1900 (1975), an on-set documentary hosted by Lovell and featuring interviews with Weir, actor Rachel Roberts, and source novel author Joan Lindsay
• Homesdale (1971), an award-winning black comedy by Weir
• Trailer
• One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• A booklet featuring an essay by author Megan Abbott and an excerpt from film critic Marek Haltof’s 1996 book Peter Weir: When Cultures Collide; a new paperback edition of Lindsay’s original novel, previously out of print in the U.S.

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.