Where to begin with Baz Luhrmann

Baz Luhrmann’s filmography is a dazzling array of riches. The Australian auteur is renowned for his flamboyant, maximalist cinema, which can initially be overwhelming and polarising. Credited as a writer, director and producer on every one of his feature films – bar a producer credit on his 1992 debut feature Strictly Ballroom – Luhrmann’s infatuation with ambitious adaptations, sumptuous production design, heightened mythology, hyperactive editing and striking visual excess makes his filmography a collection of bombastic titles.

Luhrmann has a penchant for capturing the intoxicating nature of intense emotion, spotlighting the manifestation of internal feeling rather than pursuing grounded realism. Simultaneously, he blurs the line between fantasy and reality with sweeping romanticism and devastating heartbreak. It’s an approach usually associated with operatic and theatrical storytelling, which makes sense given Luhrmann’s background as a theatre actor and director (Strictly Ballroom began as a short play) and his artistic influences (such as Puccini’s opera La Bohème).

Luhrmann’s films are a treat for the senses. This is obvious from his very first films, self-branded the Red Curtain trilogy: Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001). The untraditional trilogy is not narratively connected but united by theatre motifs of dance, poetry and song. Uncompromising in his vision, Luhrmann has maintained a focus on glamorous aesthetics and brazenly beautiful tragedies over his four decades of filmmaking.

Although it’s the final instalment of the Red Curtain trilogy, Moulin Rouge! is an apt introduction to the director’s inclination for spectacle and theatrics. The film was also a major achievement for Luhrmann; a commercial success that garnered eight Academy Award nominations, including two wins, for the opulent production design and costume design of Catherine Martin, Luhrmann’s longtime collaborator and wife.

The jukebox musical romance is a fateful, Orpheus and Eurydice tale, doomed from its opening moments, but nevertheless enticing. The film chronicles penniless English poet Christian (Ewan McGregor) falling for a diamond-draped courtesan named Satine (Nicole Kidman) – while facing the wrath of a domineering cabaret proprietor and the lurid fantasies of a salacious duke – beneath the iconic red windmill of Paris’s Moulin Rouge nightclub. Luhrmann’s heartbreaking romance is punctuated by electrifying, kaleidoscopic cabaret sequences and dynamically choreographed dance numbers that offer glimmers of hope amid the tragedy befalling these lovers.

The film is further bolstered by its sonic pastiche soundtrack, with the ‘Elephant Love Medley’ a particularly effervescent highlight. The ballad brims with eclectic pop culture references from Elton John to Dolly Parton as Christian and Satine magically float into the stars. The scene is a microcosm of Luhrmann’s otherworldly direction, combining Donald M. McAlpine’s energetic cinematography with Jill Bilcock’s breakneck editing and Martin’s gorgeously extravagant costumes.

Contained within the Moulin Rouge, this portrait of forbidden love is a perfect gateway into the filmmaker’s kitsch, grandiose storytelling. Moulin Rouge! solidifies Luhrmann as a director enamoured with the cinematic experience: music that reverberates through your body, disorientating camera movement that pulls you into the scene, and a radiating emotion that will leave you misty-eyed. 

Following the dizzy heights of Moulin Rouge!, dive into the other Red Curtain trilogy titles. Strictly Ballroom, as his first film, is the filmmaker’s most stripped-back endeavour. Yet the trappings of illicit desire and fantastical rebellion still shine through in this romance between the son of elite dancers (Paul Mercurio) and a ballroom beginner (Tara Morice). Brooding tension and evocative choreography build toward the film’s last dance, where Luhrmann asks the audience to believe the whooshing sound effects and spinning camerawork, as if the director were testing the waters of his dreamy, elevated style.

Always up for a challenge, Luhrmann’s next project was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Luhrmann transports the 1597 tragedy into a contemporary setting, swapping Italy’s Verona for Miami’s fictional Verona Beach and the feuding Montague and Capulet families for gun-wielding mafia empires in competition. Modernising without preciousness, Luhrmann makes this story of star-crossed lovers entirely his own, as the beguiling chemistry between young stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes makes Shakespeare accessible to a new generation, with teenage angst that transcends time and place. 

An equally powerful navigation of obsessive but doomed love arrives with The Great Gatsby (2013), a glitzy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel that remains Luhrmann’s highest-grossing movie to date. DiCaprio plays the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, an incarnation immortalised online by the image of him raising a glass against a backdrop of fireworks. Through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, Gatsby’s parading through 1920s New York City is underscored by piercing commentary on the American dream, corruption and lost love.

More recently, Luhrmann found his match in showmanship with Elvis Presley, the subject of two Luhrmann projects. With Elvis (2022), starring Austin Butler, Luhrmann sought to find the man behind the mythology. Then, he injected new life into the King of Rock’n’Roll’s legacy with the documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025). The film pieced together 35mm and 8mm concert footage discovered in the Warner Bros archives to relive the singer’s golden era.

At 165 minutes (the second-longest Luhrmann film, just four minutes shy of Elvis), Australia (2008) is a rather inflated epic drama, attempting to balance a romantic plot with a grappling with the country’s history of racism. The luminous pairing of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman makes for a heroic duo who lead a treacherous cattle drive through the desert, all against the backdrop of World War II. Though many of Luhrmann’s narratives enter freewheeling territory, Australia’s expansive story doesn’t stop there. Following the film’s release, Luhrmann announced a limited six-part TV series, Faraway Downs (2023). The show translated the film into episodic chapters, comprised of previously unused footage in an inventive twist on the filmmaker’s distinct cinematic voice.

Strictly Ballroom returns to cinemas in a 4K restoration on 12 June 2026.

Emily Maskell is the author of Icons of Cinema: Baz Luhrmann (Studio Press).