Fear is the key in Kidman thriller

THIS column admits to an obsession with Nicole Kidman. We always seem to be defending her.

THIS column admits to an obsession with Nicole Kidman. We always seem to be defending her.

Part of the trouble is that she tends to appear in films that critics love or hate. That she was the best thing going in Baz Lurhmann's Australia and looked wonderfully convincing in Eyes Wide Shut as the wife of Tom Cruise (and so she should have) did little to advance her career. This week I'm recommending two films that show her to best advantage.

The Others (Sunday, 8.30pm, Starpics) is an excellent supernatural thriller by Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar, and the perfect vehicle for Nicole: controlled hysteria is a Kidman specialty. Even her tendency to overact, which the best directors manage to curb, may work in her favour. It's not a film of powerful shocks and horrific special effects -- though one or two moments are decidedly unsettling -- but it generates an oppressive sense of dread and Kidman has never been better.

She plays the prim, starchy Grace, a mother living with her two young children in an isolated mansion on the island of Jersey during World War II while her husband is away fighting the Germans. What follows is more or less standard procedure -- mysterious noises heard in the night, figures glimpsed by the children, doors left open that ought to be locked -- but all of it expertly timed and agreeably effective. Amenabar has given us a basic primer in the conventions of the old dark house mystery, showing what can be achieved with modest budgets, suggestive pauses and well-judged reaction shots. Don't miss it.

Kidman had another standout appearance as Isabel Archer in Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (Sunday, 10.25am, Showtime Drama), a fine adaptation of Henry James's novel. Isabel is an American orphan who comes to live in England at the estate of a wealthy uncle and aunt (John Gielgud and Shelley Winters). After turning down two attractive marriage proposals, she is introduced to a seductive American expatriate (John Malkovich), who tempts her into marriage.

Kidman reveals a woman deeply constrained by male-driven attitudes and conventions, though Campion's feminist convictions were probably more firmly held than those of James.

John Maybury's The Edge of Love (Saturday, 9.50am, Movie One) covers four years in the life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas during World War II. Thomas lived in London with two women: his wife, Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and a former lover, Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley), whom he met again by chance while the bombs were falling. The relationship of these extraordinary women -- with Thomas, who apparently loved them both, and with each other -- is the mystery at the heart of this intense and beautiful film.

Thomas comes across as a pain in the neck, but as an insight into his dealings with women, his egotism, his smouldering moods, his fecund imagination and general indifference to the feelings of others, the film is compellingly sad and revealing.

Also set in World War II is Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Saturday, 5.20pm, Movie One), about a London governess (Frances McDormand), unfairly sacked from her job, who wangles a position as social secretary to a scatterbrained Hollywood actress (Amy Adams). What lifts the story above the level of soap and sitcom is a bracing sense of irony, aided by the compelling presence of McDormand, who can turn natural gaucheness and a somewhat forbidding manner to advantage. The film is shallow and rather twee in the style of Mrs Henderson Presents, but few recent films have given me more sheer pleasure. Miss Pettigrew is a charmer.

It swept the pool at the 2009 Academy Awards, and I'll be interested to see if Slumdog Millionaire (Monday, 12.20pm, Showtime Premiere) is as good as we thought it was.

Actually, I was always among the doubters. It wasn't so much the improbability of the story -- poor Indian urchin boy (Dev Patel) appears on a national TV quiz show to compete for a fortune in prize money -- so much as the general air of overwrought emotion and undisciplined storytelling. The settings were defiantly unromantic: Mumbai hardly looks like a nice place for a holiday.

But millions loved it, so catch it if you can. Otherwise there's Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Monday, 10.10am, Movie Greats), the third part of George Miller's great trilogy, and another must-see.