Words Seem Out Of Place

Selections from Nicole Kidman's  filmography that demonstrate her extraordinary talent and risk-taking commitment. Alejandro Amenábar's Gothic ghost tale The Others (2001) allows Nicole Kidman plenty of room to show off her expansive range as an actor, with each new choice she makes building ever so delicately, layer upon layer, into a performance that's truly transcendent. As Grace Stewart, a mother of two children with a rare and dangerous sensitivity to light, Kidman positively crackles with anxious energy, even while maintaining a proper mid-century stoicism. The constant fear for her children's safety is expressed masterfully, whether it's through her eyes popping wide open with sudden concern or a quick spike in her voice to denote intense anxiety bursting forth. The film's twist ending—which I will not spoil here, even though we're talking about a nearly two-decade old film—still packs a wallop today, thanks in no small part to Gr...

Top ten lists for movies of the decade were everywhere in December. I even saw one top 200 list! Instead of taking that route, I've chosen to just list a few films from the 2010s that stood out as my favorites of the last decade. Each of these movies blew my mind, touched my soul, and otherwise made it impossible for me to forget them. I don't know if these were the best, but they're some of the movies I remember most from the decade past. These are not reviews, just a brief sentence or two about why I dig each movie, with links to more for those I've written about before. Here they are, presented in no order whatsoever, except of course leading off with a Michelle Pfeiffer film because that's how we roll around here. mother! ( Darren Aronofsky,  2017) Aronofsky’s absorbing, anxiety-provoking assault on the senses. One of Michelle Pfeiffer’s most scorched earth performances—she deserved ALL the awards. Poor Jennifer Lawrence. “The sink’s not braced!!” Tr...

Selections from Nicole Kidman's  filmography that demonstrate her extraordinary talent and risk-taking commitment. Choosing a favorite Nicole Kidman performance is nearly impossible, as she's gifted us with so many memorable roles. The same goes for trying to select her best-ever performance - where does one begin? Certainly, though, her work as Suzanne Stone Maretto in Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995) is as excellent a place to start as any. Suzanne might well be my favorite Kidman performance and the one I'd rank atop her best-of list. In a story of small-town ambition gone wildly off the rails - with a cracking script from Buck Henry and loosely based on the Pamela Smart story that electrified American media a few years before - Kidman is an aspiring television news journalist in New Hampshire who may lack experience but makes up for it with a maniacally relentless drive for fame and fortune. Married to a local Italian restauranteur's simple and old f...

Selections from Nicole Kidman's  filmography that demonstrate her extraordinary talent and risk-taking commitment. Watching Karyn Kusama's devastating 2018 Los Angeles crime drama  Destroyer , I kept coming back to an overused but in this case entirely appropriate expression: You've never seen Nicole Kidman quite like this before. Just when you think she's shown all sides and facets of her onscreen self, she digs even deeper, revealing further dimensions to her brilliance as an actor. The film is brutal, unforgiving, and heartbreaking. Kidman plays LAPD detective Erin Bell, who is forced to revisit the undercover assignment that went horribly awry years before while trying to track down the gang leader responsible. Kidman is at the center of it all, appearing in nearly every scene. Not only that, but she's playing Bell as a much younger, healthier women in flashbacks and showing us how that traumatic undercover case impacted every aspect of her presen...

Selections from Nicole Kidman's  filmography that demonstrate her extraordinary talent and risk-taking commitment. I'm often asked if there are other actors I might be interested in giving the Michelle Pfeiffer treatment—a series of reviews offering a thorough career retrospective.  The short answer? No. But, if I'm being honest, yes, there are a few performers whose careers I'd like to explore in a similar series of posts. Although I have no desire to do an entire run through anyone else's filmography—mostly because I'm only that obsessively interested in Pfeiffer's career, but also because I just don't have the time to do it for another actor—certain actors do leap to mind. Vera Farmiga. Al Pacino. Winona Ryder. Michael Keaton. Gina Gershon. One legend stands out in my mind as particularly deserving of special attention, so much that I could imagine doing closer to a dozen or more reviews of her work: the inimitable Nicole Kidman . ...

Nicole Kidman lit up the screen in '90s films like Batman Forever. This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. Nicole Kidman rose to prominence in the 1990s, her star shining brighter with each passing year of the decade. This isn't to say she was the most popular actress of the decade—that honor likely goes to one of America's sweethearts, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, or Sandra Bullock—but Kidman's unique talents and serious acting chops came to the forefront during those years in a series of challenging roles. The Australian actress was laying the foundation for a terrific career that continues to this day. Kidman's started acting in Australian films during the 1980s. On the cusp of the '90s, she drew critical raves with her performance in the tense thriller Dead Calm (1989). Then, alongside Tom Cruise, whom she would marry in 1990, starred in the trashy but fun  Days of Thunder ...