Peter Weir Films Ranked
From being a leading light in the Australian New Wave to a versatile and Oscar-nominated Hollywood director, Peter Weir’s name was always a sign of quality even if his style was a hard one to pin down due to the breadth and range of his projects.
Over fifty years he made prestigious literary adaptations, engrossing historical dramas, visceral war films and mould-breaking genre pieces before contentedly retiring without much ceremony in 2010.
As a director, Weir worked harmoniously and collaboratively with his actors to help bring the very best performances out of them. He favoured real, often both beautiful and inhospitable locations, to add scale, tactility and threat from nature to his stories.
Peter Weir’s artistic voices is one that is much-missed in the film industry – all of his work is at the very least interesting and ranking it in any kind of definitive order is a challenge. That’s why, in this edition of Ranked, we here at The Film Magazine are comparing and contrasting all 13 of Peter Weir’s feature directorial efforts, judging each in terms of critical reception, artistic merit, and how well each story has maintained impact over time. These are the Peter Weir Films Ranked.
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13. Fearless (1993)
The miraculous survivor of a plane crash (Jeff Bridges) gets a new perspective on life and begins to test his limits in increasingly reckless ways much to the horror of his family.
Solid performances across the board aside, few films that open with a plane falling from the sky turn out as unengaging.
Having such a generic title as your starting point probably didn’t help either, but something about Fearless never quite grabs you and the film is in a constant battle to balance its magical realist tone with more grounded discussions of trauma and mental health.
