"Australia" is Baz Luhrmann first film since 2001's "Moulin Rouge." The epic romance opens Wednesday and had its premiere Monday night at the Ziegfeld Theater.

Starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, "Australia" is the fourth film from Luhrmann, who co-wrote and directed the two-hour 40-minute epic. The action of the movie takes place in northern Australia prior to World War II, when an English aristocrat inherits a cattle station the size of Maryland. But English cattle barons plot to take her land, so she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn stock-man to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier.

As far as the actors’ performances are concerned, while Kidman’s performance has received mixed review in the film, her co-star Hugh Jackman is getting raves from critics. Luhrmann himself raved about Jackman's talents: "He tackles the impossible. He's tackled the great sweeping Hollywood epic." Jackman who was recently named People magazine's sexiest man alive, said his stint in the rugged Australian Outback left him feeling decidedly un-sexy. "I'm not sure I was always sexy," Jackman commented on the red carpet. "I was pretty dirty."

Though Kidman earned an Oscar nomination for "Moulin Rouge," she fares less well here, as Lady Sarah Ashley. A schematically shaped character of an uptight aristocrat, she arrives in Australia just before the outbreak of war to bring her husband back home to England.

Meanwhile, Baz Lurhmann, who directed, produced and wrote the film, also composed its final theme. He teamed up with Elton John for the lyrics and the music of the song. Luhrmann told Time Out, "Elton called me and said he just wanted to help." Variety critic Todd McCarthy described the film as "a luxurious bumpy ride; like a Rolls-Royce on a rocky country road, it's full of bounces and lurches, but you can't really complain about the seat."

On the Los Angeles Times "The Envelope" buzzmeter, which ranks Academy Award chances according to the Times and other critics, "Australia" is currently seen fifth in the running for a best picture Oscar and third for best original screenplay. Nevertheless its premises are high indeed. We can’t forget the fact that when the director staged a post-World War II version of Puccini's "La Boheme" on Broadway a few years ago, the results were pretty spectacular. Filling every inch of the proscenium frame but letting the story and the emotions breathe, all of Luhrmann's visual strengths came to the fore, unhindered by his cinematic itch for constant visual redirection, or strenuous comic relief. Just days before the film's scheduled release, Luhrmann was still working on the movie. A true perfectionist (he and his producing partner-production designer wife Catherine Martin held nearly a dozen meetings finalizing their Christmas card), he was adding a scene here, dropping one there.

Baz Luhrmann’s three films, “Strictly Ballroom” (1992), “Romeo + Juliet” (1996) and “Moulin Rouge!” (2001) were dubbed the "Red Curtain Trilogy", as they all fell under a particular style of filmmaking. He then changed direction and plans to make a trilogy of historical epics. The first of these was to be "Alexander the Great", which was later dropped.