Nicole Kidman’s five greatest movies, according to Nicole Kidman: “It’s so weird”
Nicole Kidman has starred in almost 100 movies, ranging from the fantastically wild, like Aquaman, to the wildly fantastic, like Practical Magic, and most recently, she picked up where she left off with the 1999 cult classic, Eyes Wide Shut, and made us all shudder with jealousy in 2024’s Babygirl, opposite Beatle-to-be Harris Dickinson.
Kidman was convincing as the sharp-focused, turned bleary-eyed CEO engaging in a kinky affair with a much younger intern, such that she threw herself into Babygirl, eking out a daring and bold portrayal of female sexuality, as she deemed it a “quest to examine humanity”. The work was one of “radical honesty”, and as such, she had to turn a curious eye inwards to serve the medium with everything she had.
Whether she was dribbling over a glass of milk, which is, of course, just more than a glass of milk, or stumbling through a depressive daze in a dilapidated summer house, Kidman had a handle at all times on the symbolic importance of movie-making magic.
This approach to filmmaking has echoed throughout her career, with her opting for many challenging scripts that, again, “examine humanity” through interrogating a small part of its multifaceted phantom in great, delicious detail, and then the question becomes: Where would one begin with such a huge body of work?
Thankfully, Kidman has been asked this very question before and has pointed toward her favourite works. “What films of yours do you hold particularly dear?” she was asked by The Film Experience, and which, they went on, should someone who had never seen your work dabble in, taking her aback and eliciting a laugh with “Wow”.
With enough dramatic time before the big reveal, she shared, “Probably Moulin Rouge! and The Others and The Hours. And it’s so weird because I did all of them back to back”. A perfect three-run movie that marked her official ascendence into the cinematic stratosphere. We might compare it to a perfect three-track run on an album, like the first few songs on Paramore’s Brand New Eyes, or MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks.
Back to Kidman: outside of the start of the naughties, when everything started to pop and fizzle, and the actor was recognised in most Burger Kings she walked into, the star had another suggestion: “Probably Rabbit Hole because that says so much about grief”. In 2010’s Rabbit Hole, Becca and Howie Corbett are grieving the accidental death of their young son, Danny, and stumble through strange connections and conflicting coping mechanisms in order to stay afloat, and, as ever, Kidman turns in a dizzying, gutting performance.
On the subject of grief, she continued, “That seems to be something that I’ve circled around; I try to circle around subjects and for some reason, loss and grief, I circle around it in many different forms”.
For her fifth and final suggestion, she mused, “I also loved working with Jonathan Glazer in Birth. Whether the film actually works as a whole, I don’t know, but I think there are some really great moments in that film, and I think he’s got greatness in him.” Well, it sure does follow a strange plotline: Nicole Kidman’s husband dies of a heart attack, and a decade later, a ten-year-old boy shows up in her life claiming to be her reincarnated husband.
