A 24-year-old California surfer topped a daredevil contest Saturday that had competitors riding waves more than four stories tall.Greg Long of San Clemente was among two dozen elite surfers who took part in the Mavericks Surf Contest — considered the Super Bowl of big-wave competitions...

[Weir's] films—lush, beckoning fantasies, promising exotic vistas from strange new lands—have a seductiveness befitting an emergent cinema. Unfortunately, Weir's deftness with 'atmosphere' seems to have been developing at the expense of any narrative or thematic sense. The tantalising promise of Picnic at Hanging Rock was that the lush, repressed romanticism of its Victorian girls' school setting might have become its subject—implying that it was the s...

Weir's occultism isn't even faintly erotic, and except for the first sequence The Last Wave is over-deliberate; the camera movements are ominous as if by habit. Visually, the film is active until the first shot of [David Burton], a Sydney corporation lawyer. Every time he appears, the camera seems to hold on him—and the film croaks out. (p. 533)

Peter Weir's The Last Wave is an ambitiously conceived and dramatically executed film that combines a variety of genres—the psychological thriller, the courtroom drama, the disaster film, and the supernatural mystery—into a unique cinematic achievement. Its profound social and political implications are as unsettling as its buildup of suspense is subtle. With its linear narrative and direct, matter-of-fact tone, The Last Wave is a striking portrayal of the inner hysteria of a man and hi...