Dead Calm (1989)

Phillip Noyce sailed Nicole Kidman from the Australian small-time to the Hollywood big screen with his adaptation of Charles Williams' Dead Calm, a nautical thriller about a couple, Kidman's Rae Ingram and her husband John (Sam Neill) - characters who first appeared in Williams' Aground - on a sailing trip to recover from tragedy, but while becalmed they spot a yacht in distress and make the mistake of stopping to help the yacht's sole survivor (Billy Zane, in 1989, youthful and smouldering) - the confined-space thrills-at-sea has a beautiful simplicity with the three characters in a sphere of action no larger that just the speck of a yacht in the ocean..

★★★★☆

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Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

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The Goldfinch (2019)

I can't imagine many people enjoying this if they haven't read Donna Tartt's 780-page brick, and I can just as easily imagine many who have read it resenting the way the film glosses over all those pages and withholds the emotional keystone of the whole until the very final frame - but with expectations low from scathing reviews, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this adaptation, which, like the book, is a bewildering mass of underdeveloped themes, impossible coincidence, and meaningless allusions to the Harry Potter universe, yet still a strangely loveable, unwieldy, flawed beast that just is - who knows how or why Donna Tartt wrote it.

★★★★☆

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The Interpreter (2005)

The Interpreter has the distinction of being the first movie ever granted permission to be filmed inside the United Nations Headquarters but why Director Sidney Pollack thought such authenticity was needed is hard to fathom when so much else of what goes on in this political Sorry, Wrong Number (an UN interpreter overhears an assassination plot) stretches belief, like the earnestly expounded politics of made-up African nation Matobo; like the All-Access passes that supposedly allow interpreters to wander around UNHQ whenever and wherever they like, day or night; like the Dignitary Protection agents who fail to sweep bins for weapons...but Pollack ratchets up tension nicely and fits in some interesting ideas about words translated, whispered, and uttered in grief.

★★★☆☆

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Malice (1993)

This thriller, a bit Pacific Heights in that Nicole Kidman and Bill Paxton's married Boston couple take in a charismatic but likely troublesome renter to overcome a financial trouble, is really quite fun despite how silly and overstuffed it all is, featuring an entire serial rapist/killer subplot (with an early career Gwyneth Paltrow) seemingly for the sole purpose of justifying the taking of a sperm sample for a grander story arc involving a too-good-to-be-true Uncle Charlie, a ludicrous Rear Window flourish, and a Witness For The Prosecution consultation in a squalid apartment where truths are out.

★★☆☆☆

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Destroyer (2018)

If Johnny Utah grew old, had a kid, got grey hair and wrinkles and in older, less attractive age still hadn't managed to bring Bodhi to justice, you'd end up with Destroyer, a movie which flicks back and forwards between Nicole Kidman's Erin Bell's past (Point Break days of dangerous deep undercover cop work in LA - she's infiltrating a bank robbing gang) and her present (a grim life as a limping sad sack who still hasn't brought to justice the starey charimatic Lord Byron/Bodhi who exerts an influence over others so great, deep undercover police work is necessary (we learn absolutely nothing else about him) - these flashes backwards and forward are timed to distract audiences from implausibilities, improbabilities, gaping holes and nonsense in the plot, meaning this bleak Point Break manages to be a fairly engaging crime thriller.

★★★☆☆

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Secret In Their Eyes (2015)

This is a thriller about a 13-year-old murder case reopened by a retired FBI agent but the plot of the superior 2009 Argentinian original has been convoluted with some stuff about terrorism probably meant to add contemporary richness but which in fact just muddies the main story, and while Chwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts are fine, the movie is not the same without Ricardo Darin's shrewd face and sparkling eyes adding some humanness to the grim subject matter.

★★★☆☆

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The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Director Yorgis Lanthimos' fascinating, disturbing allegorical tale is about a cardiologist (a shaggy-bearded Colin Farrell looking like serial killer surgeon Harold Shipman) whose wife and children are made to bear the price of his sins, and it is so rhythmic, so hypnotic, by the end you will be able to predict next lines even while the point of the whole eludes you.

★★★★☆

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The Stepford Wives (2004)

Rich with material for a big screen adaptation, Ira Levin's book is a macabre suspense thriller and a kind of bodysnatching horror with lots of room for black humor and feminist commentary, but at the cost of this potential, Frank Oz's big, glossy and not very remarkable Hollywood adaptation treats the material primarily as a goofball comedy and has Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick and Nicole Kidman hamming it up as the new residents of the all-too-perfect surburban paradise, Stepford, where residents live picture-perfect 1950s lifestyles thanks to an army of worryingly subservient, docile female homekeepers.

★★★☆☆

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Strangerland (2015)

Miranda and her friends similarly dreamily wandered off into an Australian landscape and vanished but this movie is far less captivating than that, clearly trying but failing at being a new enduring Australian bush mystery of the mystic Picnic at Hanging Rock variety but also failing in its attempts at gritty Australian neo-noir realism of the, say, Mystery Road variety, because although Nicole Kidman is captivating, nothing else is remotely interesting in this dreary, unrewarding story of a promiscuous teen and her brother who are removed from the face of the red Australian earth by a duststorm.

★★☆☆☆

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The Beguiled (2017)

In her movie based on Thomas Cullinan's novel, is Sofia Coppola commenting on the fortitude and independence of women as men all around them tear each other apart in the American Civil War, or suggesting women make really bad rash decisions in the absence of men, or is Coppola's equally celebrated and lamented light touch as a director in fact a fear of saying anything at all, and had Annie Wilkes hobbled Paul Sheldon to save his life, would 'Misery' have been a thriller of greater psychological depth, are the sorts of questions that come up while watching this beautifully acted, stunningly photographed (the scene in which Kirsten Dunst picks flowers in the overgrown garden of a great southern plantation house is alone worth the price of admission), occasionally amusing, but mystifying and very slight, slice of feminist, no, anti-feminist, no, fem...gothic period drama.

★★★★☆

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To Die For (1995)

Gus Van Sant's crime drama parody received critical acclaim despite its being little more than a glorified episode of a real-life tv crime drama like 48 Hours, only with A-list stars Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix alternately hamming things up and expecting us to care less about a grubby, inconsequential suburban crime story, Clueless meets Amy Fisher and Note On A Scandal.

★★★☆☆

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Paddington (2014)

The accident-prone marmalade-loving bear from darkest Peru is rendered in 3D in this big budget, entertaining and frequently very funny film adaptation of the beloved English children's books by Michael Bond.  

★★★★☆

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Lion (2016)

A man who was adopted as a child lies on a couch in Tasmania and scours Google Earth for the home in rural India where he was brought up, in this deeply personal and deeply moving movie treatment of Saroo Brierley's 25 years' lost, a threadbare mouse-click of a story greatly benefitted by National Geographic-style photography, a score that swells at all the right emotional moments and the wonderful performance of Sunny Pawar.

★★★★☆

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Moulin Rouge (2001)

After Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann's next big breakout success was this showy "jukebox musical", a carry-on set in Paris featuring a forlorn playwright, a pompous Duke financing his play, and the leading lady they both love, and for all its showiness, boisterousness, fandango, and hot air, it is about nothing much at all and suffers dreadfully from the casting of a partucularly low-aspect Nicole Kidman as the focus of so much passion.

★★☆☆☆

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Before I Go To Sleep (2014)

A victim of a violent attack wakes each morning without memory of the days before in this gimmicky thriller which cares less about its "bad guy reveal" and more about distracting audiences from plot holes and from asking too many questions about the woman's condition (which she may have caught from Guy Pearce in Memento).

★★☆☆☆

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The Railway Man (2013)

An Australian movie, The Railway Man tells the true story of a traumatised train-obsessed former British soldier's modern-day encounter with a Japanese Kempeitai interpreter who formed part of the team that tortured him after his capture in Japan-occupied Singapore during World War II, and while the realtime story minus flashbacks is temporally slight, the build up to it is gruelling and engrossing and when redemption of a sort comes, is very emotional.

★★★☆☆

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Stoker (2013)

A pleasing thriller for fans of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, this story of mysterious Uncle Charlie's arrival into a schoolgirl's life has a distinctive arty, gothic style, stellar performances from its four main leads - Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode and Jackie Weaver - and is notable for being the first English-language production of director Park Chan-wook. 

★★★☆☆

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Based on a short story, Traumnovelle by 'the literary Sigmund Freud' Albert Schnitzler, Stanley Kubrick's last film is a slow-burn psychological suspense drama about adult sexual relations and monogamy, pondering whether a wife's erotic fantasy about an American Naval officer constitutes a betrayal of some kind against her husband.

★★★★☆

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