Over lockdown I traipsed through Nicole Kidman’s filmography (with a Hard Quiz trophy as the fruits of my labour) and I figured I’d write down some thoughts about each of her performances.

1. Birth (2004)

Here Jonathan Glazer has a million different cakes and manages to eat every last one of them too. Birth is metaphysical and grounded in reality. It’s howlingly camp and sincerely devastating. It’s poetic and prosaic. And somehow Kidman is keyed into all of Glazer’s tones, textures and implications, somehow all at the same time. Another actor might have taken the totemic features of the script and literalised them; another actor still might have diffused what’s elliptical about it into mere haziness. But Nicole, with needlepoint precision, eloquently tells us everything we need to know while also indicating that there’s plenty that we never will- love and grief are too massive for anyone to fully comprehend, after all. What I love most about Nicole’s best performances, never more acutely than here, is her skill with close-up. With slight gradations of movement and stillness she laces single shots with prisms of meaning- the opera house sequence is the most iconic (and rightfully so), but you could pluck literally any scene from the film and find her pulling that same feat off again and again and again (her confrontation with Anne Heche! the bathtub scene!). It’s an impossible performance in an impossible film, and yet!

2. The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

This jewel of a performance, along with the ornate film it’s encased in, was such a formative game-changer for me when I first experienced it as a wee teen, and it only grows more precious to me with every passing year. For all the irresistible forces surrounding Isabel Archer, Kidman plays her by examining what might happen when an unstoppable force becomes an immovable object. She’s a dazzling addition to Campion’s canon of women for whom curiosity is liable to curdle at any moment into an attraction to danger, whose deficiencies or poor judgment are neither condemned nor dismissed as unimportant. As with Campion’s various stylistic gambits, the modern inflections dotted throughout Nicole’s performance aren’t ruinous anachronisms; instead, they serve to complicate and enrich the relationship between this adaptation and its source material. Campion’s take on Henry James is as caustic as acid, but Kidman’s silken performance is never in any danger of dissolving. I know many don’t share my affection for this Portrait, but if this is the hill I die on, then so be it.

3. Dogville (2004)

For me Dogville occupies a really satisfying middle ground between Lars von Trier’s signature brattiness and Lars von Trier’s signature finger-wagging- I can totally understand why either or both of those qualities render it completely unwatchable for some, but I think here he modulates them better than in any of his other works. Coming off the trifecta of humongous performances from Bodil Jørgensen, Emily Watson and Björk, Nicole Kidman’s might seem more reserved at first glance, but it twists and deepens into something more sophisticated and more rewarding than any of those sledgehammer displays of martyrdom. When we meet Grace, she’s acting as our audience surrogate- she is us, less shy than intimidated, scoping out and thinking through every last detail of this imposing Brechtian town. As Dogville bears its teeth, Grace’s disbelief and desperation shift into something much more diabolical, and we get to see all those cogs click into motion under her skin thanks to von Trier’s relentlessly tight camerawork and smashing together of disparate takes. For three whole hours, Kidman guides you through Grace’s Stations of the Cross with ferocious stamina, and just as you’re catching your breath she twists the knife you didn’t even realise she was holding. 

4. To Die For (1995)

The performance that finally jolted American critics and audiences into viewing Kidman as a performer with serious merit- here she had something to prove, and you can feel that determination in every frame. Gus van Sant’s throw-everything-at- the-wall approach can leave limited actors seeming intimidated or bewildered- like Keanu Reeves in Idaho, or even Matt Dillon here- but Nicole is completely in sync with his hyperbolic line of attack. Suzanne Stone is a character ripped from the headlines, lit up in neon and splattered with blood. Her direct-to-camera monologues are delicious, but she’s even funnier and crueller in group scenes, playing a woman who’s always giving a performance even when the cameras aren’t rolling. Of these scenes, the ones with Allison Folland and Ileana Douglas draw out the most interesting notes from her performance, largely because Kidman gives those performers space to carve out their own sly, heartbreaking impressions on us. 

5. The Paperboy (2012)

In a world populated with alligator-gutting killers, skeletons in closets and Zac Efron in a semi-permanent state of undress, Kidman’s Charlotte Bless emerges as The Paperboy’s most indelible creation. She savours every line delivery, letting her backwater drawl curl around her mouth like cigarette smoke, changing from a purr to a bark at a moment’s notice. Whether she’s pissing on Zac Efron, faking a climax during prison visiting hours, or waxing lyrical about good vibrations, Kidman commands the screen in a completely surprising way, but the detailed character work never feels strenuous. Lee Daniels has never been one to let good taste get in the way of a good story, and in Kidman he found someone who would take his tawdry indulgences and run with them, no questions asked. It’s her funniest performance by a country mile, a haute-trash masterwork that, along with second-best-in-show Macy Gray, also manages to somehow smuggle something resembling a beating heart into the sleazy proceedings. 

6. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

A strange little movie, not least because it’s masquerading as erotica while secretly being extremely chaste, Eyes Wide Shut is a perfect distillation of Kidman/Cruise/ Kubrick’s individual strengths and eccentricities. However blinkered by a POV that squarely belongs to Cruise’s lead, Nicole is luminous, sparking like a firecracker while still stewing in the anxieties and resentments that Kubrick folds into this fluorescent nightmare. On a micro level, she hits every mark she needs to as the peculiar, horny, cocky, sad Alice, but as an artifact of who Nicole Kidman The Wife, Nicole Kidman The Celebrity and Nicole Kidman The Serious Actor were in 1999, it’s all the more fascinating. 

7. Bangkok Hilton (1989)

If this 1989 Channel 10 miniseries ever feels ungainly and lumbering, that’s never Nicole’s fault. An early high point in her career and her first chance to play a fully realised character, she proved that she was more than capable of giving a truly emotionally potent performance. And it’s a tricky assignment- she needs to elicit enough of our sympathy in her early episodes playing a socially-stunted shut-in that we care enough about her quest for justice when she ends up wrongfully imprisoned after a con artist exploits her gullibility. Throughout the entire taxing runtime she knows exactly when to sit at a slow simmer and when to boil over, and even though she’s the volcano erupting at the series’ centre she’s still so generous with all of her scene partners. By the time Bangkok Hilton had turned into a race-against-the-clock prison thriller, I was so emotionally invested in the central relationship between Nicole and Denholm Elliot that the breathless climax genuinely moved me. Schapelle Corby eat your heart out!

8. The Hours (2002)

My relationship with this film over time has been tumultuous to say the least- after my first watch I was happy to dismiss it as treacly and precious in the worst, self-consciously ‘literary’ way. That Stephen Daldry then went on to prove my case by making some of the most hideous Prestige Cinema™ in the Weinstein wheelhouse sealed the deal for me: The Hours must be shit. Imagine my surprise when I threw this on for a rewatch and found myself sitting in a puddle of tears. On the surface Kidman’s Virginia Woolf is ‘transformative’ biopic Oscar-fodder, but she’s also tasked to play her as a supermassive black hole, a figure with enough gravitational pull to draw in every single other element of the film with only 28 minutes of screentime. All the performances here (Jeff Daniels…I Pretend I Do Not See It) are outstanding individual achievements but are so perfectly synced with each other that it’s impossible to judge them as anything other than a symbiotic whole. Kidman, Streep and Moore together paint a triptych of depression that’s sprawling in scope but wrenchingly intimate, giving all three of these women thorny, complicated inner lives but never losing sight of the huge canvas they’re sitting on.

9. Rabbit Hole (2010)

After years in the critical wilderness, this was a breakthrough moment for Nicole, and all the praise was well-earned. The film has its fair share of the dialled-up domestic sparring you’d expect from a grief drama like this, but the clashing sensibilities of Kidman and director John Cameron Mitchell give off some glorious sparks. Her performance is most interesting in the moments she underlines the erratic, irrational behaviour that grief tends to stir up in even the most level-headed of people. Slapping a stranger in the supermarket, patronising her fellow group therapy members (“why doesn’t he just MAKE another angel?” is a line that’s lived rent-free in my head for over a decade now) and picking unwise fights with family members- these are all actions that could seem unlikely or preposterous but instead feel inevitable thanks to Nicole’s well-shaded work. 

10. Dead Calm (1989)

A star-making performance, Dead Calm introduced our Nic to Hollywood, and you couldn’t really ask for a more striking calling-card. Nicole has to carry the entire film on her red curl-bedecked shoulders, essentially leading a two-hander against a scenery-chewing Billy Zane while Sam Neill is off searching for clues. And boy does she go through the ringer, meeting every punishing demand with tenacious physicality and knotty troubleshooting. The sticky complications she loads onto her character mean that even during Dead Calm’s most dubious passages, the film’s sexual politics turn out persuasively untidy rather than simply regressive. 

11. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

A lot of actors seize up when trying to tackle Yorgos Lanthimos’ writing and default to a flat, Wes Andersonian deadpan. I have plenty of thoughts about this particular script and its execution but Nicole’s efforts here are pretty unimpeachable. She teases out such fascinating textures from Lanthimos’ dialogue, oscillating between probing curiosity, cruelty, cattiness and despair, but she allows this character to also be pretty inscrutable at crucial times too. It’s a wonder that, despite being embedded in her director’s inchoate tone and overbearing stylistic tics, her performance still reads as so unvarnished- Anna as a creation feels more immediate and tactile than most of the ‘real’ women Kidman has given us over the last decade.

12. The Golden Compass (2007)

I’m sure enough ink has been spilled regarding the complete nightmare that was this abortive attempt at a Lord of the Rings-style trilogy (handing 180 million dollars and the fate of your studio over to the director of American Pie 2 might have been the first error of judgment?). On the plus side, there aren’t any errors of judgment to be found in Kidman’s elegant, saucy turn as an ice queen villain who saunters around with a monkey on her shoulder. Some may wave this performance off as mere posing, and maybe it is! But nothing else has harnessed Nicole’s sheer star power quite as well as this, and she damn well knows how to wear a gown and walk into a room. The peak of Movie Star Nicole, she blazes onto the frame, and whenever she leaves it you sorely miss her.

13. The Others (2001)

The other massive 2001 hit that cemented Nicole as a versatile box office draw (200 million worldwide is no mean feat for a modest Spanish production). And the two lead performances could hardly be more different; here she gives us a descent-into-madness that’s tinged with brutal sadness. It’s not all hushed austerity though; Nic’s very well aware that this is also a lark where she hysterically runs around a mansion wielding a shotgun. It’s a little surprising to rewatch something that had enough cultural impact to land a Scary Movie spoof and note just how few scares Amenabar brings to the table- for the most part, he’s happy to just watch Grace slowly unravel (yes, that’s the third Grace I’ve covered, and there’s still one more to come!). Considering how peculiar and unsympathetic Kidman plays her, it’s all the more impressive just how compelling that unravelling is.

14. Lion (2016)

By 2016, I was unsure whether Nicole still had a performance like this in her; her tendency to lean on signature mannerisms and prioritise playing ‘concepts’ over naturalism felt baked-in at that point. The script commits its fair share of missteps in its simplistic exploration of adoption (the monologue Nicole has to give about a vision of a ‘little brown boy’ could’ve probably done with a few more drafts, to put it lightly) but Kidman’s emotionally grounded work startled me. Nicole gives the film the symbol of pure, unyielding love it asks from her, but through some pretty nervy character work she also paints motherhood as an ongoing cycle of fantasies and disappointments. Just don’t talk to me about her Little Orphan Annie wig. 

15. Big Little Lies (2017)

If Nine Perfect Strangers is evidence that Liane Moriarty’s high-fructose, simple carb recipe of bulletpoint plotting and proudly boldface characterisation can have disastrous results, Big Little Lies showed us how good it actually can be. It’s soap opera at its glossiest, but with a cast this committed to the cause that’s less a genre trapping than a luxurious opportunity to explore. Kidman’s handed the very difficult job of playing Celeste’s domestic violence plot line as both the huge cloud hanging over Monterey and as this very specific woman’s unique experience. Her therapy scenes against Robin Weigert are the obvious shining example but the way she threads Celeste’s distrust, vulnerability and pride through otherwise innocuous Wines With The Gals scenes is just as impressive and illuminating. And yes, I’ll continue to choose to believe the second season doesn’t exist.

16. Moulin Rouge! (2001)

No matter how many times I watch this film (in high school I watched it every New Years Eve) the first half hour still gives me a headache- everything about it, even the title, is punctuated with an exclamation mark. Luhrmann’s outré, attention-deficit style threatens to swallow the actors whole, so it’s pretty remarkable that amongst the chaos Kidman and Ewan McGregor can make any kind of impression. Admittedly, Nicole’s vocals are thin, lacking the control or dynamics that the role probably warrants, preventing her renditions from being particularly distinctive, but boy has this girl got moxie! She’s giving wilting flower, she’s giving bright and bubbly and she’s giving smouldering temptress, in a performance as rubbery and vibrant as the filmmaking demands. Most importantly though, Nicole & Ewan anchor the film with a sincere, sensitive lightness of touch, drawing you into an archetypal love story that could have easily been drowned out by the surrounding cacophony.

17. Margot at the Wedding (2007)

I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a critical pile-on quite like the one this received simply for being ‘unlikeable’- I’d understand if it was because of Noah Baumbach’s kitchen-sink screenplay or his wobbly hold on performance, but the film’s sourness is one of the few things it’s got going for it. For Nicole Kidman, a performer who by this point in her career had a string of post-Oscar disappointments, was already the target of tall-poppy sentiment back home and whose chilly screen presence had begun to confuse a lot of viewers, the timing of Margot’s release could not have been more perfect. She grabs the role by the horns, a spiky, spiny work of ‘realism’ that still looms so large as to earn her spot in the portentous title- The Wedding ain’t the subject here, it’s Margot.

18. The Goldfinch (2019)

A terrible adaptation of a novel I hated in the first place is an unenviable starting block, but Nicole- not unlike our titular finch!- manages to ultimately emerge from the rubble unscathed. Blessed with pitch-perfect casting, her Mrs. Barbour is both an iron gate and a guiding light, with a frosted-over façade that belies a core of real warmth. Even though Oakes Fegley and Ansel Elgort both give absolutely nothing as Theo, that only strengthens the merits of her performance- Nicole summons deep feeling from thin air, playing a woman who tragically projects far too much onto a child who’s never able to fully reciprocate her love.

19. Batman Forever (1995)

This is Nicole serving all-out camp, and in a cast filled to bursting with outrageous performances hers understands Joel Schumacher’s assignment best of all. While Jim Carrey is busy sucking all the air out of any scene he’s in, Nicole plays Chase Meridian (stiff contender for her greatest character name) with the right mix of winking cheekiness and Veronica Lake glamour. As a kickboxing psychoanalyst who just happens to run around Gotham in lingerie, she brings a fun screwball kick to every ridiculous line of dialogue (and they are all ridiculous).

20. Stoker (2013)

I know this movie inexplicably has plenty of fans but it pains me to see Aussie treasures Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Jacki Weaver put such hard work into such a lousy script (by the dude from Prison Break no less!). It’d be easy to simply focus on Nicole’s centrepiece monologue here; it’s just about the sole memorable scene in the entire film, and she absolutely eats it up, no crumbs. But for the entire lead-up to her Big Moment (which is handed to her on a silver platter anyway), she slowly coils her way around us, ultimately playing this Evil Mother as something altogether stranger and sadder.

21. Fur (2006)

What exactly is this ‘imaginary portrait’ trying to tell us about Diane Arbus? I couldn’t really tell you, and I won’t try to defend this as any kind of overlooked or misunderstood masterpiece. But I do have to go to bat for Nicole’s magnetic, absorbing turn as ‘Diane’- the script’s oddly diluted thematic conceits might have quickly receded from my memory but a surprising number of beats from her performance have remained seared there. An early anxious monologue about fashion tips, the almost-horny curiosity she brings to Diane’s reactions to things like a corpse or a pair of socks- no matter how much Robert Downey Jr’s character simply doesn’t work at all, sitting right next to it is some bona-fide full-strength Kidman.

22. Bewitched (2005)

This was my first Nicole cinemagoing experience so please forgive my still-residual affection for what is pretty plainly a terrible movie. The script is a complete mess, never deciding if her lead character is a complete naïf or a scheming trickster or if she’s even the lead in the first place. Despite all that, I think Nicole is actually damn great throughout the entire thing- she’s completely at ease as the endlessly likeable rom-com star, a register she’s never really been trusted to excel at before or since. She’s dealt the injustice of a romantic lead as nauseating as Will Ferrell but she firmly resists going down with his ship, floating above him with pure effervescence.

23. Boy Erased (2018)

It’s hard to see what drew Joel Edgerton specifically to this material- it’s ripe for adaptation but he’s sorely lacking a point of view and woefully ill-equipped to give this the queer lens it desperately needs. It’s gay trauma porn that’s so ‘tastefully’ presented that it’s not even offensive in an interesting way. Nicole runs away with the movie hands-down, especially considering the talented Lucas Hedges is directed to give basically one note throughout. Kidman manages to paint a compelling portrait of blind faith and then tear away at it to become the film’s core voice of reason. And despite pulling that off she’s never tempted to overplay that arc or to draw focus from Hedges- a true ‘supporting’ performance in every sense.

24. The Invasion (2007)

I think there’s a worthwhile film buried here somewhere under the mess of stitched together, Wachowski-helmed, studio-imposed reshoots. Despite the complete chaos of the production, Nicole does a commendable job of steering us through it and getting incredibly close to even selling it to us. She’s especially good in her early scenes, laying down the ominous groundwork and nestling into the movie’s odd tone; she’s a much more convincing therapist here than she’d be in The Undoing. And even as the movie’s wheels fall off it’s still entertaining to see her kicking into full scream queen gear.

25. Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017)

China Girl is such a bizarre little project; even as a Campion devotee, this overwritten mishmash of her pet obsessions severely tested my patience. No matter how you slice it Elisabeth Moss is simply miscast as the lead- the supporting players are left to try to compensate, and luckily Kidman’s handed what’s probably the most coherent and persuasive plot thread. Everyone’s playing to the back row here, and Kidman relishes the chance to go big, armed with some fake teeth, freckles and a Campionesque grey wig, playing a rich, fed-up, Pinot gris-swilling Sydney lesbian. It’s rewarding to see Kidman and Campion reteam to explore motherhood, and Kidman really does bring it, but maybe she should’ve sat this one out and waited a little longer for the reunion.

26. Malice (1993)

This movie is so bonkers in such a multitude of ways that it’s hard to accurately give a Cliff’s notes summary, but what I can say is that Nicole is balls-to-the-wall up to the task. She knows this material is lurid trash but isn’t embarrassed by that at all, rising (sinking?) to the occasion with wicked glee. Aaron Sorkin has committed countless sins but giving Nicole Kidman the line “he is a little fucking troll who deserves to be put out of his misery for fucking up my life” certainly isn’t one of them.

27. How To Talk To Girls At Parties (2017)

Nicole knows she’s in a deliriously stupid movie and she gives it the deliriously stupid performance it’s begging for. This isn’t really anyone’s finest hour, and I do wish John Cameron Mitchell would’ve gone even further and made this even sexier and more grotesque, but Nicole’s cockney punk priestess shoots the film with a heady dose of pure adrenaline. You can feel Mitchell’s adoration for his muse, from the way he shoots her to how he structures the film around her as a mythic figure; that adrenaline courses through the film even when she’s absent. And with the small screen time she does get, she’s always loose and funny, at once a primal scream and a maternal embrace.

28. Flirting (1991)

Somehow playing a high school girl a year after playing Sam Neill’s grieving wife in Dead Calm (the range!), this is just one of many delicate little performances in an unfortunately gross artefact (if you haven’t read that Thandiwe Newton profile yet, please seek it out!). As the token ‘posh’ and ‘mature’ girl, Kidman strikes a great balance between bullish posturing and vulnerability while never really delineating those two things as mutually exclusive forces. It’s a sensitive picture of adolescence, with a keen eye for the crucible that is the boarding school environment, and she plays so well off Newton’s own radiant performance.

29. The Beguiled (2017)

Sofia Coppola will always be Sofia Coppola, and what others find satisfyingly oblique about her work I generally find overcautious and underdeveloped. At the very least this is shot and designed gorgeously, and performed by Nicole and Kirsten Dunst with real hunger and venom. There’s plenty to appreciate in Nicole’s performance as she navigates simmering sexual tension and steadily mounting dread (never more deliciously than with her piercing gazes and curling smiles in the dinner table scene) but you guys…that accent. She’s managed a respectable southern accent before so it’s especially disappointing just how all over the shop her rhotics and vowels are this time around, and you can really sense she’s straining the entire time to keep up.

30. Paddington (2014)

I’m so glad the Paddington movies came through to show the world children’s entertainment can be silly and absurd and still be crafted with care and respect for its audience’s intelligence. While I agree with the general consensus that the formula was perfected with the 2017 sequel, this is still an absolute delight, with the whole cast and design team sincerely committed to Paul King’s daffy sweetness. He wisely doesn’t spend too much time with Kidman’s chic and devious taxidermist, but she injects her scenes with enough feline menace that the film doesn’t lose any spark as it’s consumed by its obligatory caper plot. If Nicole really just wanted to work on a project she could watch with her young children, she chose damn well.

31. Strangerland (2015)

As Nic’s long-overdue return to Australian independent cinema, you can sense she’s eager to prove she’s still got it, giving a performance that’s prickly and stripped of any kind of vanity. Unfortunately this slow-burn mystery ends up writing itself into a corner and descending into psychosexual hoohah, leaving Nicole searching for both her missing children and a film worthier of her performance.

32. Practical Magic (1998)

Literally nobody involved in Practical Magic seems to agree on what kind of movie they’re actually making, as it drunkenly swerves between tones and genres and plots with no rhyme or reason. Nicole acquits herself exceptionally well, hopscotching along with the piecemeal script’s many flights of fancy while giving the film the anchor point it sorely needs. Kidman & Bullock both foreground the sisterly relationship at the film’s core, and their electric chemistry makes the whole thing worth watching, making you wish they’d teamed up on a better script in the years since.

33. The Peacemaker (1997)

In which Nicole Kidman dismantles an Atomic bomb. This is the closest Nicole ever got to playing a Bond Girl, playing the bureaucratic foil to George Clooney’s renegade special forces colonel. The script and direction hem her in a little as the ‘straight man’, but she’s still given plenty of ludicrous action set pieces to savour. She handily proves herself as an action hero and as Worried Woman On Phone; get a girl who can do both.

34. Vietnam (1987)

This soapy relic overestimates our investment in the trivial personal conflicts of a Federal minister’s family back in Australia while the war in Vietnam rages on. Comedic scenes of Kidman’s character’s entry into the dating scene are hideously juxtaposed with scenes of soldiers committing war crimes (funnily enough, cruelty is only ever enacted by US troops in this weirdly patriotic miniseries). Defter hands could have made that brutal contrast amount to a whole lot more, and Nicole is unfortunately saddled with the least compelling story arcs. That is, until one striking sequence in the final half-hour where Nicole’s anti-war activist takes an on-air phone call to her estranged veteran brother, to which, in the first masterful close-up of her career, she brings unexpected emotional depth and sincerity.

35. Far And Away (1992)

I can’t really imagine a version of this film that is successful- Ron Howard, who’s best in workmanlike gun-for-hire mode making sturdy genre movies like Backdraft, and Tom Cruise, who’s best working in idioms far more ironic than this one, are simply out of their depth making romantic, epic melodrama. Nicole is a better match for the material than those two, but she was still a few years shy of the point in her career where she would’ve attempted bigger swings with her performance. As it is, it’s a charming, silly performance, and she makes the most of Howard’s broad, pastichey tone and her natural chemistry with Cruise. That Irish accent isn’t particularly Irish, but next to Tom Cruise she’s practically speaking Gaeilge.

36. Just Go With It (2011)

I can understand that taking a holiday to Hawaii to film a few slapstick scenes with Dave Matthews (?? wtf is this movie) was probably the balm our Nic needed after shooting the heavy grief drama Rabbit Hole. It’s fun to see her take the piss out of herself here, and it’s a game performance (even if lending her talents to such a witless script can’t help but feel at least a little embarrassing). If nothing else, it’s evidence that maybe she should’ve been doing more straight-up comedies this whole time- she gets a better laugh out of a line as throwaway as ‘I’m gonna get a divorce’ than most of the actual gags in this shitstorm (there’s an extended sequence involving someone giving a sheep the heimlich).

37. Birthday Girl (2001)

I lost my mind when I found out there was a movie in which Nicole Kidman plays a Russian mail-order bride, and then I lost it further when I realised that movie was actually pretty boring and bad. But hey, that’s certainly not for Nic’s lack of trying; this is big, brassy character work that meets every demand the twisty, sordid plot throws her way (including being stuck with nonsensical character motivations and being literally gagged and tied).

38. Billy Bathgate (1991)

This adaptation, a strange misfire from Tom Stoppard, bevels all of author E.L Doctorow’s edges and burnishes away any of the grit that might have made its loss-of-innocence gangster story worth telling. Kidman’s role suffers the same fate, but unlike Loren Dean’s charisma vacuum of a lead performance she at least tries to elevate her damsel in distress to a femme fatale. You totally buy why all these gangsters are tripping over themselves for this woman, even though as written she’s little more than a cipher.

39. Wills & Burke (1985)

This is such a hideous artefact of Aussie larrikin comedy, a kind of exploitation parody of historical epics that sounds fun on paper but ends up relying far too heavily on pretty rancid, limply ‘satirical’ racism. Nicole, in a B-plot removed from the actual expedition, is luckily given the only funny running gag of the film. They have the good sense to end on their strongest note, with Nicole leading a ludicrous musical-within-a-film where she’s genuinely really funny, having a ball with such stupid, broad physical comedy.

40. The Railway Man (2013)

Tasteful to a fault, this war PTSD drama is so anonymous that it completely escaped my brain as soon as it finished. Nicole’s role can essentially be boiled down to a series of worried glances, but she does still bring competing energies of steel and comfort to her Concerned Wife. Of the mid-teens Firth/Kidman collabs, this is at least the lesser of three evils.

41. The Upside (2017)

As much as I wish Nicole and Julianna Marguiles had swapped roles here, they both turn out pretty credible performances in what’s otherwise a pretty suspect film. A rare instance of her being allowed to use her natural accent in a latter-day Hollywood movie (I’d call it Australian but all those years working abroad have added some curly vowels to the mix), it’s a treat to see her so relaxed, even if this is a performance she could give in her sleep.

42. Destroyer (2018)

‘Relaxed’ is the last word anyone would use to describe this performance. I certainly have to give her brownie points for effort, but I also have to question whether this role in this boilerplate thriller warranted any effort at all. There’s some bracing vocal and physical work here but it’s all just so *much* work, reading less as a hardened detective than a straight-up ghoul (the hair and makeup team really did her dirty with this one).

43. Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)

Kidman is the best part of this odd bore, and most of my issues with her Martha Gellhorn stem from the broader problems ingrained in the whole enterprise- Philip Kaufman attempted to shoehorn the formula he used (to better effect) in The Unbearable Lightness of Being into a crass, juvenile Forrest Gumpy erotic war adventure (which ends up being so much more tiresome than the sum of those parts ought to be). Kidman and Clive Owen might have great chemistry but those fumes unfortunately aren’t enough for this 154 minute-long slog to run on.

44. BMX Bandits (1983)

This movie actually kinda slaps.

45. Windrider (1986)

Thank god for Nicole Kidman, without whom this very 80s romcom would be totally unwatchable. Tom Burlinson (the other famous Tom she hooked up with) is flat-out unappealing as the smarmy windsurfer we’re supposed to be rooting for for some reason. Enter a heavily-eyelinered Nicole playing his rockstar love interest, and suddenly there’s something worth paying attention to. Don’t take my word for it though, because I’m half-convinced this was just a lockdown fever dream I had and not an actual film.

46. Secret in Their Eyes (2015)

If you squint, you can almost make out the guilty-pleasure piece of 90s throwback pulp that this could have been. Kidman has a thankless role here, though she is thrown one batshit scene in which her district attorney dresses down a suspected rapist-murderer. It’s a nervy, high-wire piece of acting that she manages to pull off despite making barely any sense in context, an all too brief flash in a film where she mostly has to stand around looking pretty and sad.

47. Bombshell (2019)

Gretchen Carlson ought to be the lead of this project, but is weirdly deprioritised in favour of Margot Robbie’s dewy-eyed innocent and Charlize Theron’s Christmas Ham Megyn Kelly pantomime, and the movie simply forgets about her for large swathes of its runtime. Kidman gives us brief flashes of Carlson’s long-festering resentment but her strangely non-committal performance never claws through her shoddy wig and makeup work- clearly slapped together once they realised they’d spent all their budget on making Charlize look the part.

48. The Family Fang (2015)

I have no clue why this material resonated with Nicole so much that she decided to produce and star in it, but hey get that bag girl. She’s more alert and engaged here than she probably needed to be, but the material is so flimsy that her performance plateaus about a third of the way through once the plot starts to sputter. And for a film with the word family in the title, you’re never persuaded that this woman could plausibly be Christopher Walken’s daughter or Jason Bateman’s sister.

49. Being the Ricardos (2021)

Stop casting this woman in biopics! Sometimes the tension between an actor’s screen presence and the figure they’re playing can reap fascinating rewards (Cate Blanchett, Eddie Murphy and Natalie Portman can attest to this). Here, not so much. Kidman challenges herself to carve out two distinct Lucilles but neither completely land due to the sheer amount of Nicole that naturally bleeds into both of them. Much like with Sorkin’s other directorial efforts, a lot of the scenes here feel like first takes, as if all the actors are rushing through the script without much attention to how they’re being blocked and shot. It’s a much more interesting performance than I was anticipating, but I’m not sure I could call it a success. When she wins her second Oscar for this please don’t reach out to me. (edit: apologies, Jessica Chastain winning was so much worse)

50. Bush Christmas (1983)

I dunno guys, it’s what it says on the tin.

51. Days of Thunder (1990)

The first and worst of a string of 90s Cruise-Kidman collabs, and Nicole’s introduction to Hollywood. She makes the most of her role as the Australian neurosurgeon intern love interest (sure, why not), bringing some much-needed charisma to Tony Scott’s dusty piece of Top Gun self-plagiarism. Cruise’s cockiness levels here are radioactive, so it’s not particularly a cause of celebration when he ends up romancing Our Nic (their meet-cute basically consists of him sexually assaulting her at work).

52. The Stepford Wives (2004)

I’d give her points for effort if she’d decided on one performance to funnel it into. Taking a cue from director Frank Oz, whose grab-bag of tonal and dramaturgical impulses bounce around from one scene to the next (and often even within those scenes themselves), Kidman constantly whiplashes between ideas at breakneck speed. The beats she hits are sometimes funny and inspired, but they’re thrown together so carelessly they end up being a soupy mess.

53. My Life (1993)

This script shares a lot of DNA with the writer’s previous effort Ghost, with everything basted in a thick layer of sticky sentimentality. Nicole has the difficult job of playing a Long-Suffering Wife™ to a terminally ill husband; her character is literally described as a ‘saint’ but is given no interiority to explore what that might mean for her own life. Nicole passes the assignment handed to her, but this film has largely been forgotten for good reason.

54. The Undoing (2020)

I’m not entirely sure what this shaggy-dog “mystery” series thinks it’s about, aside from its vaguely outlined thoughts about power and obscene wealth. Similarly vague is Kidman’s performance at the centre- while Hugh Grant hams it up and Noma Dumezweni gets to lend maturity and depth to proceedings, Kidman’s a little lost in the crossfire. Even though everyone (including Grace) is constantly talking about what a skilled therapist and ‘reader’ of people she is, that barely translates through Kidman’s performance, with Grace coming across as mostly passive and clueless.

55. The Prom (2020)

A musical as loud and garish as this one didn’t need further Ryan Murphication- as staged by the man who foisted Glee onto the world, it’s ‘sassy’ without being witty, busy without having any rhythm or beauty. The cast, Nicole included, are clearly enjoying themselves as they mug for the camera, but the schtick wears thin pretty quickly. As for her character, she’s strangely disposable; she’s given one solo number that I can only describe as Kidz Bop Fosse which is a bit of fun, but she tends to fade into the background in every other group scene. I guess she doesn’t get to wear a silly beret and do high kicks very often, so I’ll allow her this one.

56. Queen of the Desert (2015)

Considering the lightning her collaborations with other big-name auteurs have bottled, you’d think a Nicole Kidman/Werner Herzog joint would’ve amounted to a whole lot more than whatever this is. She’s perfectly serviceable as Gertrude Bell, but the performance, just like the rest of the film, is dull as all hell. Goes to show that a pretty white person standing around in the desert does not a Laurence of Arabia make.

57. Genius (2016)

If you think a movie about book editing would be grey and boring, you’d be right! This is sludgy and airless, with some pretty terrible performances from Jude Law and Colin Firth at the centre. Unfortunately Nicole and Laura Linney (herself a genius at playing harried wives) can’t revive a film that’s dead on arrival, despite their best efforts. Apparently Michael Grandage directed Nicole to a fantastic performance on the West End, but it’s hard to believe watching this.

58. Cold Mountain (2003)

Jude Law works overtime in his segments to draw his Confederate soldier with enough detail that we keep watching all two and a half hours of his long journey home. Back on the ranch though, Nicole’s work is way too undefined- her ‘stoic’ and ‘circumspect’ look suspiciously like ‘stiff’ and ‘blank’. I do have to give some concessions considering most of her screen time is shared with Renee Zellweger doing her best bull-in-a-china-shop routine, and staring down that performance would probably prompt most actors to overcorrect. But Ada is still a whisper-thin creation, a Penelope I can’t imagine anyone embarking on an Odyssey for.

59. Trespass (2011)

I can barely believe this movie exists- it makes zero sense that something like this was released in 2011 or that Nicole and Ben Mendelsohn decided it was worth their time. It’s a cheap, nasty home invasion thriller that doesn’t flatter anybody involved, but I guess Nicole plays the weird gauzy flashbacks with a level of winking MILFiness, which is something at least.

60. Emerald City (1988)

Nicole is so poorly served by David Williamson’s musty script and Michael Jenkins’ pervy direction that she has barely any chance of summoning up a respectable performance. She easily captures your attention whenever she’s on screen with a naturally vibrant screen presence, and she’s clearly excited to play one of her first major adult roles, but there’s just no character here to play.

61. The Bit Part (1987)

Featherweight stuff- Nicole isn’t asked much of but she still manages to overplay basically every single line delivery and every reaction shot. Considering the material that isn’t the worst crime she could commit, but you can definitely tell she’s still a very green performer.

62. Before I Go To Sleep (2014)

I was one of probably about twelve people who bought a ticket to see this hack job in the cinema, an airport-novel-Memento-lite that would be fun trash if anyone involved was having any fun. The fact Colin Firth is dishing up career-worst work as her husband doesn’t help matters, but Kidman, who has a knack for making brittle and wooden compulsively watchable, is simply…brittle and wooden.

63. Nine (2009)

Great gowns, beautiful gowns. Unusual Way is, for me, the lynchpin of Nine: The Musical- at once woozy and sobering, it’s the song that starts peeling away the layers of nostalgia and horniness lacquered onto the act preceding it. It’s a shame, then, that Unusual Way in the film adaptation is basically a disaster in every respect (and a great example of the film’s abject failure to honour or even understand the original text). Transposing the soprano tune into a murky key down where Nicole has seemingly been directed to serve ‘funeral dirge’, Nicole and co. manage to turn one of my favourite songs into a tuneless mess. Having stripped the role of Claudia down into, essentially, this one song, the song is the performance, and the song stinks.

64. Australia (2008)

Kidman has confessed that she hates this performance, and it’s not hard to see why. She certainly commits to the bit as the pompous aristocratic fish-out-of-water but she’s so beholden to Baz Luhrmann’s bad taste and wrongheaded instincts that there’s no hope for success. Her characterisation certainly fares better than Hugh Jackman’s forced blokiness, but she still too-often reverts to a misty-eyed pout, stranded in a frankly offensive, regressive film.

65. The Interpreter (2005)

Some actors are skilled at accents. Nicole Kidman has never and seemingly will never be one of them. And in a long and storied career spanning scores of questionable dialects, this “South African” one might be the most inexplicable. I’ve seen this movie twice and I still couldn’t tell you much about the plot, which would be fine if the performances were engaging, none of which are here. Nicole delivers all her lines with the same grave weight, telegraphing at every point that this is capital-s Serious stuff. You can lump this in with a handful of other films released around the same time, when Nicole was basking in the afterglow of her Oscar win and got shoehorned into projects without anyone considering if she was a good match for the material in the first place. Bizarrely, this made me want to be an interpreter when I grew up, but don’t ask me why.

66. Aquaman (2018)

Yeesh. I’ll be the first to admit that this is not the kind of filmmaking I generally respond to, not least because the filmmaking on display is so fucking terrible. Everyone in the cast here has seemingly forgotten how to act, but that doesn’t make Nicole’s performance any less squirm-inducing. The physical fish-out-of-water (ha!!!!) comedy, the fight scenes, the teary closeups- none of it works. But I bet she bought a great house with the paycheque, so let’s celebrate that.

67. Skin Deep (1983)

This is such a noxious little film, with Nicole bearing the brunt of the script’s cruellest machinations. Just as you think she’ll be given something to do, the film swiftly disposes of her- mercifully, I suppose, in this case. Perhaps this soap opera about fashion modelling didn’t need a statutory rape and murder plot?

68. Grace of Monaco (2014)

Olivier Dahan had the great gift of Marion Cotillard in La Vie En Rose, her hurricane-force performance as Edith Piaf ploughing through the film with such velocity that most barely noticed the scattershot debris she left in her wake. Here…no such luck. Kidman is hopelessly adrift, convincing us of neither Grace Kelly as Concept nor Grace Kelly as Human Being. She definitely looks the part, but it’s a shallow, muddled mess of barely legible emoting with no coherent point of view, and her case isn’t helped by the boring film surrounding her.

69. The Human Stain (2003)

An embarrassing stain on the careers of everybody involved- Nicole isn’t the worst in show here but that’s a subterranean hurdle to clear. This is ‘de-glam’ at its most condescending, a work of poor-person drag that also feeds into the nasty script’s worst ideas about sexuality and womanhood. The blame doesn’t lie squarely with Nicole, and I won’t hold her responsible for the preposterous monologue she has to deliver to a crow (??), but she misses every opportunity to afford this character anything resembling nuance.

70. Nine Perfect Strangers (2021)

Credit where credit’s due- to pull out your worst-ever performance in the fifth decade of your career takes, I dunno, something. The scripts here are pretty dismal, but as written Masha should at least have some kind of cosmic allure, an air of persuasion that’d explain why everyone around her is drinking her psychedelic Kool-Aid. As performed by Kidman, though, she’s simply offputting, constantly squinting and bugging out her eyes, the rest of her face seemingly immobile, all the while struggling to wrap her mouth around an excruciatingly poor “Russian” accent. Some of the other performers fare a bit better, but considering she’s the de-facto lead of this interminable 400 minute-long series that’s mostly shot in overlit close-up, there’s nowhere for her to hide, and she doesn’t seem comfortable for one second of it.