Nicole Kidman’s 28 Best Film and TV Performances, Ranked

28. ‘The Stepford Wives’ (2004)

Frank Oz’s black comedy remake of the classic thriller is a mess, but the performances are so fun you can almost forgive its confused tone (not to mention the twist on the original’s twist is a great way to keep things fresh). A TV exec recovering from a nervous breakdown, Kidman and her family head to the suburbs for a fresh start (and maybe a more colorful wardrobe, her husband hopes), where Kidman is quickly alarmed by the eerily cheerful wives of Stepford. And though Kidman gravitates towards more serious projects, she finds the comedy in Joanna’s severe black bob and among the Lily Pulitzer prints in Connecticut, delivering zingers perfectly balanced on the knife’s edge of sincerity and spoof. The movie was a critical misfire (and a troubled production), so we have been deprived of more Kidman comedy performances. What a shame. —MP

27. ‘Being the Ricardos’ (2021)

No, Nicole Kidman is not a famously funny person — though she has excelled in comedic roles — so yes, her casting as Lucille Ball in Aaron Sorkin’s talky drama raised eyebrows and elicited that classic Lucy, ‘Ughhh!’ But then, Ball herself never claimed to be funny. ‘What I am is brave,’ she said, and Kidman runs with that theory, lowering her voice to a pack-a-day growl and giving audiences the behind-the-scenes Ball: a tough-as-nails powerhouse who had to practice every punchline in a mirror but understood the precise nature of physical comedy. What Ball did was an acquired skill, and Kidman artfully reveals the force of will that made it happen, in the process revealing (and reveling) in what it takes to create a legacy. —MP

26. ‘Batman Forever’ (1995)

While the ‘Batman’ franchise’s leading ladies have a tendency to swing wildly between meek good girls and wild women gone very bad, Kidman’s first foray into the superhero milieu offered her something different than the series’ history might suggest. In Joel Schumacher’s 1995 ‘Batman Forever,’ Kidman spread her wings as a newly created character — no superhero backstory here — who offers both sex appeal and psychoanalyst smarts.

No, Dr. Chase Meridian might not seem like the traditional Kidman role. Frankly, it seems easier to imagine her playing Catwoman and going the split-persona route of Halle Berry or Michelle Pfeiffer. But Kidman herself has long been clear about what was thrilling about playing the good doctor. It’s that she’s a damsel in distress, really, someone with plenty of brains and not a whole lot of sense, the kind of part she hadn’t previously taken on. In 1995, this was new for her, and her interest in playing something unexpected shines through in the role, complete with a fresh curiosity that sparks up a seemingly predictable part. —KE

25. ‘Destroyer’ (2018)

The hard-nosed LA detective with battle scars and emotional wounds to spare? We know that part, we know that movie, but we don’t know it quite like Kidman in Karyn Kusama’s fascinating 2018 neo-noir. Much has been made about the stripped-down quality of Kidman’s physical look in the film. As Detective Erin Bell, she’s all shapeless clothes, her trademark red tresses turned gray and short, but it’s the spareness of her emotional landscape that really stands out.

It’s the kind of role that we’re used to seeing men portray, and so Kidman’s spin on the ‘strong female character’ already scans as something different, but as she slips further into Erin’s darkness, as Kusama slowly reveals more and more about how she landed there, the actress touches something far beyond ‘unexpected casting.’ It’s gritty and hard-nosed and scary and decidedly different, and even as Erin doesn’t root for herself, we can’t help but root for Kidman. —KE

24. ‘The Northman’ (2022)

There are long stretches where it seems like the biggest mystery of ‘The Northman’ is why Nicole Kidman is in it. She has a regal mein as Queen Gunrun, no doubt, but Robert Eggers’ Vikingified riff on Hamlet is much more concerned with the violence and vengeance that Alexander Skarsgard’s Amleth wants to wreak on his feckless uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang). But then the film gives her a monologue. It would be highly dishonorable to spoil what she says, or to whom, but it’s a scene so meaty, you can tell it sustained her for the rest of the movie’s run. It’s almost worth the entirety of ‘The Northman’ on its own, too. When Kidman gets to flex her intelligence, her sharpness, then her dialogue cuts deeper than any sword to the gut. —SS

23. ‘Far and Away’ (1992)

The kind of sweeping romantic epic they just don’t make these days, this is a film in which the delicate rules behind literal land-grabbing and the impact of the Great Potato Famine play major parts in understanding the story. It’s also the kind Kidman should have made dozens of.

In the 1992 Ron Howard epic, Kidman is spoiled little rich girl Shannon Christie (early ‘Titanic’ vibes), who opts to leave her wealthy Irish family (and handsome, if boring suitor; again, early ‘Titanic’ vibes) to travel to land rush era America to make her own way. She’s joined by a scrappy local farmer (Tom Cruise) who also wants his own life, land, and, hell — his own Shannon, too.

Howard drags his stars through all sorts of waypoints of pioneer life — the lush but cursed homeland, the dirty and mean big city, amber waves of grain vistas, the whole lot of it. Kidman finds a way to bring nuance to what is essentially a Grown-Up American Girl Doll role. Shannon finds herself through rough circumstances and hard luck, and Kidman’s early shine does a whole hell of a lot to sell this particular brand of American dream. —KE

22. ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ (1996)

Nicole Kidman steps into the worlds of Henry James and Jane Campion for the New Zealand director’s surreal and fever-dreaming interpretation of the 1880 novel. Kidman makes Isabel Archer, an American society woman who comes into great fortune only to debase herself in a series of bad conquests, an idealist with heroine qualities rather than a victim of circumstance. Heretofore in 1996 not always an actress who radiated hungry sexuality, Kidman brings both vulnerability and a fierce intelligence to the Jamesian lead. (Why doesn’t she just dump John Malkovich’s flaneur Gilbert Osmond? Kidman keeps you guessing.)

‘The Portrait of a Lady’ is an early showcase for Kidman’s penchant for searching, feminist women defying tradition, even if the movie is little remembered in either the actress’ or Campion’s filmographies. —RL

21. ‘Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus’ (2006)

Nicole Kidman took a few hairpin career turns in the mid-aughts, from the middling remake of ‘Bewitched’ to god-awful horror retread ‘The Invasion,’ plus career-topping performances in movies like ‘Margot at the Wedding’ and even ‘The Stepford Wives’ (another remake). After winning the Oscar for Best Actress for ‘The Hours’ and not bringing in quite as many awards as one would hope for Anthony Minghella’s ‘Cold Mountain,’ Kidman went for broke in indies.

Steven Shainberg’s ‘Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus’ is one such example, a bizarre and creepy surreal, well, imagining of the life of photographer Arbus. As Arbus was known as a chronicler of outsiders, the film finds Kidman digging deep into the midcentury icon’s craft, and befriending the social castaways of 1950s New York City. That includes a chronically hirsute neighbor played by Robert Downey Jr. The movie’s languid pacing and disturbing imagery were true to her subject, and Kidman was game to take another woman on the sidelines, looking beneath the surface of typical biography for something deeper and stranger. —RL

20. ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ (2017)

In a film as consumed with masculine delusion as ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer,’ it’s easy to see Kidman fall by the wayside as just the wife of Colin Farrell’s cursed cardiac surgeon, who is forced by the mysterious Martin (a terrifying Barry Keoghan) to choose one of his family members as a sacrifice. But Kidman is a shrewd performer, and she makes Anna a lot more interesting. She plays the part as warm and protective on the surface, but drops the polite veneer to reveal a deeply selfish streak as the film continues and the situation grows dire. It’s a chilly, remote performance, fitting for playing a woman willing to see one of her children die if it means she can live.

Opposite Farrell, she finds an absorbing anti-chemistry of sorts, displayed best in an excruciating sex scene that ranks among the most awkward in cinematic history. In the TV star stage of her career, Kidman has excelled at playing frazzled women in domestic distress; ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ twists that familiar type into far more complicated, unsympathetic directions. —WC

19. ‘Practical Magic’ (1998)

Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as two twisted sisters at their respective ‘90s primes? It’s not the stuff of magic, but rather just divine casting. Kidman plays somewhat against type as a drug-addled, bad boy lover who reluctantly returns to her hometown after accidentally killing her abusive boyfriend with the help of her sister (Bullock). Oh, and both of them are witches who dabble in black magic, poison, exorcisms, and love spells. Kidman and Bullock dancing to ‘put the lime in the coconut and shake it all up’ while getting blasted on margaritas just might be one of the most iconic film scenes ever, and leaves this not quite rom-com among Kidman’s best roles. It’s Kidman at her most fun, loose, and sexy — and with some of her best hair ever. No small feat given the pantheon of Kidman hair looks. —SB

18. ‘Top of the Lake: China Girl’ (2017)

There is a glaring absence at the center of Jane Campion’s ‘Top of the Lake: China Girl,’ and it only grows as each of the six episodes plays out. Call it connection, recognition, or identity, what’s missing for each of the main characters in ‘China Girl’ edges further away as the story twists and turns — like a knife pressed against a fraying cord. For Robin (Elisabeth Moss), Pyke (Ewen Leslie), and Julia (Nicole Kidman), they’re clinging to the love between a parent and a child. All that matters is the title of ‘mom’ or ‘dad,’ which — for the latter two adopted parents and Moss’ birth mother — is a rank as cherished as it is fragile.

Knowing the power it bestows, Mary (Alice Englert) refuses to refer to Julia as her mother. Pyke and Julia’s impending divorce puts added strain on their already rebellious, risk-inclined daughter, and her increasingly dangerous acts of defiance send Kidman’s character tumbling, untethered, into an emptier and emptier void. Watching Julia’s inability to parent her child is both frustrating and convincing because her opposition is equal parts vehement and empty. Julia talks a good game. As an academic, she can counter the absurd provocations made by Mary’s cartoonishly evil older boyfriend, but language and reason have no impact on him. She’s not engaged in a war of words, where she’s comfortable, but a nasty, lawless cage match for the soul of her daughter, and she doesn’t realize it until it’s much, much too late.

By the final episode of ‘China Girl,’ it physically hurts to watch Julia’s persistent passivity. To Julia, if Mary refuses to recognize her own mother — what she’s done for her, how much she cares for her —then Julia may as well not exist. (A key scene in the finale finds a way to literalize these ideas in a truly heartbreaking confrontation.) Kidman, though, very much does exist, and she leaves an indelible mark on the series despite her character’s shrinking stature, threading the needle between disappearing entirely and stealing the spotlight. As the cast’s resident movie star, she could easily ham it up to convey her character’s struggle more dramatically — screaming instead of speaking, gesticulating rather than persisting — but such showboating wouldn’t serve Julia’s journey. She is a mother adrift, not a woman waiting for her big moment. That Kidman can inhabit such a minimal space, embodying one more powerless parent in an ensemble filled with them, is a testament to her professionalism as much as her talent. She turns absence into abundance, once again earning any recognition that comes her way. —BT

17. ‘The Beguiled’ (2017)

‘The Beguiled’ is a war story, but not necessarily about the American Civil War. It’s a war for the attention and attraction of a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell) who finds himself, wounded, at a mostly abandoned girls school in Virginia, and it puts Nicole Kidman in her general era. As the headmistress Miss Farnsworth, everything she does — from a look, a little French phrase, the way she adjusts her posture — is all about conveying power and control to the other women and girls; the fact that all this is legible to the audience underneath a veneer of politeness is a better testament to how well she understands this Southern matron than even the slight twang of her accent. She goes much, much further than politeness as the movie unfolds, of course, but Kidman’s performance is so complete from the jump that she makes Miss Farnsworth’s choices both surprising and inevitable. —SS

16. ‘Rabbit Hole’ (2010)

John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play ‘Rabbit Hole’ lacks the wrenching immediacy of David Lindsay-Abaire’s original stage production, a character study of a grieving couple whose marriage frays following the death of their young son. Expanding the chamber drama to incorporate more characters and the world outside the couple’s house, the film saps the powder keg emotional intensity present on the page, resulting in a tearjerker that doesn’t quite ever provoke your tears.

When the film works, it works because of Kidman’s committed performance as Becca, the mother of the lost child struggling through her grief. Even in the pantheon of Kidman’s roles, Becca stands out as a particularly manic character, prone to acidic outbursts and frantic changes in emotional register. The film’s premise invites a certain level of melodrama, and it is to Kidman’s credit that it never goes too far in that direction. Even when Becca is at her most unlikable, you feel the despair she carries weighing down on her like an anchor. —WC

15. ‘Expats’ (2023)

When a project lands a star of Kidman’s stature, it’s typically a good idea to take advantage, and that’s exactly what Lulu Wang does in her extraordinary original series, ‘Expats.’ From the jump, Kidman serves as a turning point for a story of grief, identity, and indecision. Using her well-deserved star turn to lay out her character’s essential framework, Kidman plays an American mother living abroad in Hong Kong who loses a child. Struggling to move forward without knowing if she should — is her son dead or alive? lost or abducted? — Margaret is a woman torn in two. Should she keep searching or mourn and move on? Should she forgive those involved or hold them, and everyone else, accountable? Should she down on her instincts or give in to the advice of her loved ones? Ultimately, these questions boil down to one: Should she stay or go?

Kidman gets a number of scenes filled with big, overwhelming emotions. Her ability to channel pain through fury is staggering, as is her emotional clarity in moments where conflict stirs varied reactions. (Her waiting room quarrel with Margaret’s husband Clarke, played by Brian Tee, is incredible.) But ‘Expats’ really takes off in quieter, everyday interactions. It’s the way she leaves an apartment, buys groceries, and goes about her life that gets under your skin; that makes you feel empathy not just for Margaret’s situation, but for Margaret herself (who isn’t always the most likeable person). Kidman understands this at an innate level, and her measured, acute depiction of an impossible-to-imagine situation grounds her character and makes the show around her all the more affecting. Kidman has movie star magnitude and charisma, to be sure, but seeing those qualities stripped away creates a thrilling new performance here. —BT

14. ‘Dead Calm’ (1989)

Kidman was 19 when the camera started rolling on Phillip Noyce’s high seas thriller about a couple dealing with grief over the death of their child by embarking on a long Pacific Ocean voyage alone on their yacht. Even then she was playing a member of the ultra rich! Her Rae is someone whose tragedy has made her numb to life, and she certainly doesn’t need another trauma — but the sheer terror of this voyage arguably jolts her back into feeling alive again. Her husband (Sam Neill) rescues the lone survivor, played by Billy Zane, of a derelict pleasure craft drifting on the ocean.

Zane’s character is psychotic, of course, and he quickly tries to get rid of the husband so he can be all alone with Rae. ‘What about those people?’ Rae asks the castaway about his crewmates’ fate. ‘Thayre wasn’t any food poisoning, was thayre?!’ Oh no, they definitely did not die because of spoiled provisions, Rae. Even with her then shrimp-on-the-barbie Aussie accent and playing a part that’s meant to assay merely various degrees of ‘being menaced,’ Kidman more than holds her own with a Zane playing derangement dialed up to 11. George Miller was a producer on ‘Dead Calm’ and it’s easy to see some proto-Furiosa in the way that Rae fights back. —CB 

13. ‘Stoker’ (2013)

‘I can’t wait to watch life tear you apart,’ widowed mother Evelyn (Kidman) tells daughter India (Mia Wasikowska). That’s not in the cards, but you understand why India might be a little more willing to run wild with her newly discovered uncle (Matthew Goode) in the wake of her father’s death. Kidman is a mega-watt star, but she proves adept at waltzing away with an entire movie with a supporting role here, delivering an icy mother-from-hell for the ages, combining viciousness with off-kilter flirtation that adds a note of bleak comedy to director Park-chan Wook’s English-language debut. Inspired by ‘Shadow of a Doubt,’ ‘Stoker’ front-loads even more psychosexual intrigue to its story. —MP 

12. ‘The Hours’ (2002)

Anyone with a working knowledge of what types of roles win people Academy Awards would not be shocked that Kidman’s sole Oscar win for Best Actress comes from playing a historical figure. But that line of thinking discounts the work she put into making her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s domestic drama about three generations of women’s relationship to the novel ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ so singular.

Here was the final proving ground that the Australian actress was a utility to any director trying to execute a vision that may seem like too big of a swing on paper. Her immersion into Woolf’s world, demonstrating a creative force that pushed through tragic circumstances, is worthy of more consideration than ‘by a nose.’ —MJ

11. ‘Big Little Lies’ (2017)

A new subgenre of rich, complicated, occasionally boozing ladies with a mysterious past made its way to prestige TV with ‘Big Little Lies,’ based on the Liane Moriarty bestseller about a group of moms and the secrets they keep. Kidman is excellent as the buttoned up Celeste Wright who begins to spiral (another Kidman specialty) as she contemplate leaving her abusive husband (Alexander Skarsgard).

As written by David E. Kelley and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée in the superior first season, the TV role allowed Kidman the freedom to explore a character beyond the scope of a two-hour movie. It’s a well she’s now returned to several times over the years, but none surpass this purposefully chilly creation, for which she won an Emmy in 2017. —ES

10. ‘Malice’ (1993)

The less you know about Harold Becker’s wonderfully fucked-up 1993 neo-noir ‘Malice,’ the better. Still, it’s fair to note that what makes Kidman — starring here alongside Alec Baldwin and Bill Pullman in an early Aaron Sorkin script chock-a-block with Sorkin-isms — so good is what always makes her good. To wit, that’s her ability to embody seemingly disparate emotions and motivations in one wicked performance.

While other early examples — like ‘Far and Away’ and ‘Days of Thunder’ — rely on audiences liking Kidman’s characters and feeling warm to them, in Becker’s film, Kidman puts that idea on its head. Yes, we like Kidman’s charming newlywed Tracy, and damn, do we feel for her when she endures a medical emergency that seems to threaten her idyllic life with sweet husband Andy (Pullman). But… that’s not all there is to it, and the joy and pleasure of the film and Kidman’s work within it is watching all of that collapse in truly unexpected ways. —KE

9. ‘Margot at the Wedding’ (2007)

Noah Baumbach’s 2007 dramedy is one of his most caustic, and Kidman is at her most fearless in the title role — her character, a neurotic, prickly, judgmental fiction author, seems intentionally calculated to offend. Kidman’s genius lies in her ability to avoid sanding off any of the character’s rough edges while still letting the humanity push through to the surface; as Kidman herself noted at the time of the film’s release, ‘…the spikiness and the guardedness and the anger is actually a manifestation of her need to protect herself. She’s not in a safe place, really, because her sister doesn’t know how to take care of her, and she doesn’t know how to take care of her sister… They feel like they should be very, very close, but they actually do not bring out the best in each other.’ All of this and more comes across in Kidman’s extraordinarily subtle performance, one of her most nastily amusing and profoundly moving. —JH

8. ‘Days of Thunder’ (1990)

Kidman’s international breakout remains a high point of her early career, a high-octane banger that combines visceral thrills and only-in-the-movies touches (who in their right mind wears a white blazer to a NASCAR race?) and remains an incredible ode to her sex appeal. To put it mildly, Tony Scott’s ‘Days of Thunder’ rules (and is also the only film to bear the wonderous twinned screenwriting credits of ‘Robert Towne and Tom Cruise’), but much of that is due to Kidman’s uncanny ability to fuse steely reserve with wild abandon.

Kidman plays Dr. Claire Lewicki, a neurosurgeon who finds herself entangled with the rowdy high-jinks of both newbie driver Cole Trickle (Cruise) and his literally nutso rival Rowdy (Michael Rooker). In her role, Kidman is tasked with channeling both big ‘you’re all a bunch of boys!’ energy (‘and yerrrr scarrrrred!’) and a deep desire for Cole and his let’s-go-fast nature. The result? An internal battle that’s hot and wild and absolutely electric to watch. —KE

7. ‘To Die For’ (1995)

After years of turning in fine work in thrillers (‘Dead Calm,’ ‘Malice’) dramas (‘Billy Bathgate’) and epic action films (‘Days of Thunder,’ ‘Far and Away’), Nicole Kidman proved she could also be hilarious in this wickedly funny media satire about a small town reporter whose ruthless ambition leads to murder. Using a Joyce Maynard novel (which was itself based on a true event) as source material, screenwriter Buck Henry and director Gus Van Sant gave Kidman her most layered and original character to date here, and like the character she plays she took the opportunity and ran with it.

Her performance is pitch-perfect: heightened but believable, superficially sweet and amiable with a constant undercurrent of savagery, and filled with impulses both self-aware and self-destructive. Much of her story is told via her own narration in a series of close-ups directed toward the camera, and in these moments Kidman and her character have nowhere to hide — we see every thought, feeling, and decision coming across with cruel and gleeful precision. —JH

6. ‘The Paperboy’ (2012)

For some, Lee Daniels’ sweaty late-‘60s grindhouse absurdity ‘The Paperboy’ is only so bad it’s good. But Daniels’ brazenly serious commitment to such silly pulp material — including Matthew McConaughey as a swaggering reporter back in his hometown to cover a death-row inmate (John Cusack) — warrants serious attention. At the time this film rolled around at Cannes 2012, Nicole Kidman was delightfully the most fun she had been in years as vamping vixen Charlotte Bless, determined to clear her husband’s (Cusack) name.

She pees on Zac Efron! She humps a chair during a prison meeting while eye-fucking Cusack! She’s out of control, sex oozing out of her, her blonde hair and plumped limps all but siren-calling the camera. Kidman is wrongly not acclaimed enough as a comic actress, and in ‘The Paperboy,’ she lets loose in a way she hadn’t before or hasn’t since. —RL

5. ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)

Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is the anatomy of the marriage of Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice Hartford (Nicole Kidman) and, in hindsight, also the anatomy of the marriage between Cruise and Kidman. They spent over 15 months shooting the sleepwalking psychosexual drama, which follows Dr. Bill’s plunge into a kinky conspiratorial underworld. Who sends him into the precipice? Kidman as Alice who, in a scorching pot-fueled monologue (‘it’s not the pot, it’s you!’), reveals all the loose ends in their marriage and exposes Bill’s worst insecurities.

While Kidman gets less screen time than Cruise, her performance is unforgettably eerie and almost somnambulent — like the way she drunkily flirts with an art dealer before turning him down. Why? He asks. ‘Becaaaaause,’ she says with a champagne drawl. ‘I’m maaaaaarried.’ —RL

4. ‘The Others’ (2001)

Kidman isn’t exactly an actor people label as a Scream Queen, but some of her richest and most arresting performances toe the line into the realm of psychological horror. Take the 2001 ghost story ‘The Others,’ a gorgeously crafted ghost story that casts her as the gothic heroine. A 1945 housewife awaiting her husband’s return from the war, Kidman’s Grace is a rigid Catholic woman whose faith and composure are tested when she and her children are subject to strange supernatural phenomena around their British island country home.

Alejandro Amenábar’s film is notable for its dripping atmosphere and gorgeous style, and Kidman complements that with a great sense of presence, between her statuesque body language and icy blue eyes. But as the supernatural incidents pile up and Grace’s composure is unsettled, Kidman ably frays and dissolves onscreen, her eyes turning buggy and her stature growing shaky. It’s an underrated challenge to depict pure horror on screen, but Kidman makes it look easy. —WC

3. ‘Dogville’ (2003)

Lars von Trier centers his Brechtian-inspired ‘Dogville’ around a blockbuster movie star, whose under-a-bell-jar image he set upon to deconstruct: Nicole Kidman. Freshly off her Best Actress Oscar win for ‘The Hours’ and also out of her messily public but oddly inscrutable divorce from Tom Cruise, Kidman flew to rural Trollhättan in Sweden to get on a soundstage with von Trier and his cast.

Grace Mulligan (Kidman) is on the run from her gangster father (James Caan) in a hardscrabble town whose residents’ largesse eventually turns to disgust and disdain, and they degrade and debase her to a breaking point. Ar least, until she decides to take it no longer.

This is one of Kidman’s boldest and most unvarnished performances, a complete 180 from her prior star turns, and an indication that Kidman would never let herself get too comfortable in her choice of roles. —RL

2. ‘Birth’ (2004)

Jonathan Glazer’s drama starring Nicole Kidman as a woman confronted by her past perplexed audiences and critics when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2004. But there’s no denying it’s one of Kidman’s crowning achievements and certainly most out-there turns.

Anna (Kidman) is understandably quite jolted when a 10-year-old boy shows up at her Manhattan doorstep claiming to be the reincarnation of her dead husband. She’s meanwhile readying to marry someone else, the vanilla Joseph (Danny Huston), and this chain of events sends her into confusion and questioning. A masterful long take of Kidman settling into her seat at the opera after the news of her dead husband’s possible return comes crashing and swelling down around her is a testament to her ability to telegraph emotions merely from the quickening of her heartbeat and the slow cascade of panic on her face. —RL

1. ‘Moulin Rouge! (2001)

‘Oh poetry, yes. Yes. Yes! This is what I want: Naughty words!’ Kidman achieves a true career peak in Baz Luhrmann’s movie-length tribute to the ways in which performance plays into all aspects of life, from the bedroom to the ballroom and beyond.

As ‘the sparking diamond’ Satine, a courtesan in fin-de-siècle Paris, Kidman picks up the baton from Marilyn Monroe and delivers a rendition of ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ with top hat and riding crop that kicks off the adrenalized star part to follow over the next two hours. Despite endless remixes of late 20th-century pop hits, as much CGI as you’d find in a ‘Star Wars’ prequel, Kylie Minogue as a green fairy, and Placido Domingo as the singing moon, Kidman commands the screen, bending it all to her will — and still conveying fragility underneath. You can see her turn uncertainty into determination with a straightening of her spine and a lift of her chin after she’s just proclaimed Freddie Mercury’s ‘I’ll top the bill, I’ll earn the kill, I’ll have to find the will to carry on with the, on with the, on with THE SHOW!’ and walks past the camera to go and break poor Ewan McGregor’s heart.

This is a tribute to the interplay of artifice and authenticity in fueling sexuality as potent as any of Marlene Dietrich’s portraits of women leading men to their doom with Josef von Sternberg — and Luhrmann finds ever more screens and shadows and lighting effects to make Kidman into a Eurydice-like mirage. No popular spectacle this century has been driven by a performance as singular as hers here. —CB