Film Actresses & Global Classics

When it comes to sex, all of us have experienced longing and frustration, but where along the continuum of love and madness does desire tip into terror?

The actor’s art as demonic and erotic: this vision will inform my reflections on Catherine Deneuve as an actress.

In playing Grace, Kidman’s challenge was to maintain a constructive tension between naturalness and artificiality…

As a film about a couple in crisis, the specific genius of Eyes Wide Shut is that it foregoes infidelity in favour of fantasy, adultery in favour of desire, and shows the imaginative forces to be more powerful that the enacted ones.

As a character, Isabel Archer challenges the actress to plumb her depths even as she maintains her surface composure. In accepting this challenge, Nicole Kidman delivers what is for me her finest screen performance.

Nicole Kidman, because of her vast range and versatility and the radiance of her feu sacré, is the finest actress, in my view, in English-language cinema today.