10 Best Nicole Kidman Movies, Ranked (And Where to Watch Them)
If I count every music video, TV show, and movie that Aussie megastar Nicole Kidman has made in her career, we would be approaching somewhere in the region of 100 credits. It’s a formidable body of work, and one that now spans over four decades—not that anyone could tell. Kidman is, in many ways and to many people, justifiably the reigning queen of cinema—when she says that “heartbreak feels good in a place like this,” we listen.
With five new projects scheduled for release in 2026, there’s no sign of the actress slowing down—but for now, we can attempt to whittle down her extensive back catalogue to her very best roles.
Here are my ten picks for Nicole Kidman’s greatest movies to date, ranked in ascending order, and taking into account both the movies themselves, Kidman’s performance in them, and their significance to her wider career. To find out where to watch them, head to the list below—as always, JustWatch has you covered.
With its Pulitzer Prize-winning source material, literary themes, Miramax backing, and relentless Philip Glass score, an argument could be made that The Hours is the most egregious example of Oscar bait this side of the Millennium. If that’s not your cup of tea, you might want to approach with caution. If you like a well-acted, literary, prestige-y biopic, like Shakespeare in Love or A Quiet Passion, though, you might really get into it!
The movie focuses on three different women (Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore round out a legendary cast) in three different eras, with Kidman’s performance as Virginia Woolf providing the foundation, despite the hilariously unnecessary prosthetic nose the actress had to wear. Oddly enough, despite some stronger nominations over the years, it remains Kidman’s only win at the Academy Awards.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer marked a high point among the more daring roles Kidman started to take on in the second half of the 2010s—and if you like director Yorgos Lanthimos at his most well-behaved (think Poor Things and The Favourite), you really need to see him at his meanest.
As I mentioned, after a bold turn in Park Chan-wook’s Stoker in 2013, Kidman spent a few years making middlebrow fare before a string of interesting choices. This began in 2017, a year in which the actor appeared in Jane Campion’s Top of The Lake and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled. The best of the lot was her incredible turn in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, acting opposite a young Barry Keoghan—including one hair-raising sequence in which she kisses the young actor’s feet. As Anna, the increasingly desperate matriarch of a family terrorised by Keoghan’s possibly telekinetic sociopath, Kidman daringly commits.
The late ‘00s were not a golden era for Nicole Kidman, with extravagant productions like Nine, Australia and The Golden Compass failing to connect with audiences. One movie that stands out from that unusual period is Margot at the Wedding, an early Noah Baumbach film that fans of the indie darling’s more recent movies (Marriage Story, Frances Ha) will find fascinating.
Kidman plays the title role: a writer returning home for her sister’s nuptials who is self-involved to the point of being cruel. It’s a wonderfully against-type performance from Kidman, who treats her character like a human being and just about succeeds in making her empathetic. The movie was Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale and is probably still his most challenging film, but it’s a challenge that Kidman accepts.
Say what you want about Keoghan’s feet or Harris Dickinson’s glass of milk, The Paperboy still feels like Kidman’s most notorious role. If you’re in the mood for something sexy and silly (with the Southern thriller vibes of movies like Joe and Mud), I suggest giving it a watch.
The plot follows a reporter (Matthew McConaughey) covering a story about an alligator hunter who finds himself on death row for killing a corrupt cop—what a mouthful! Kidman plays a woman who is looking to marry the doomed man once he’s been exonerated—but along the way, she catches the eye of the reporter’s brother, played by Zac Efron. Steaminess ensues.
The film has attained cult status, but audiences at the time didn’t quite know what to make of the age gap between Kidman and Efron, not least for the moment when Kidman urinates on his jellyfish sting… Were it released today, the memes would be incredible.
The Others is a mid-century gothic horror, somewhere in the lineage of Guilermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (and if you’re a fan of that kind of atmospheric horror, you’ll want to check it out), and a great example of a particular theme in Kidman’s career: that admirable sense of adventure she’s shown in working not only in a wide variety of genres but also with a wonderful range of filmmakers. It’s especially endearing how often she’s lent that star power to international directors looking to make the jump to English-language movies.
We’ve already mentioned Lanthimos and Chan-wook on this list, but Alejandro Amenábar gives Kidman the lead role and lets her run with it in The Others. In the movie, Kidman plays a mother of two photosensitive kids who start to believe their house is haunted. The actress’s committed performance in the role would earn her one of two Golden Globe nominations the following year. More on the other one very shortly.
Eyes Wide Shut was Stanley Kubrick’s final movie (he died just a few weeks before the premier) so if you like his most unnerving stuff (like Clockwork Orange and The Shining) or other twisty plots involving rich people getting freaky (like The Ninth Gate or Rosemary’s Baby), it’s kind of a classic of both genres. The movie took a record 100 days to film, a detail that makes Kidman and Cruise’s weird line readings all the more interesting.
Even without the knowledge of their highly publicised divorce, there would still be so much to unpack about the actress’s wonderfully strange performance. As the wife of Cruise’s libidinally entranced New York doctor, Kidman doesn’t have an enormous amount of screen time, but when she does, she’s at her most alluring and elusive. The sequence in which Kidman dances to “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” in front of a mirror remains one of her most iconic.
Newly single and sitting atop the UK charts for a duet with Robbie Williams, Kidman ended 2001 on a song—but the best was still to come. A few months earlier, she enjoyed her first of many red carpet premieres at the Cannes Film Festival as the star of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, in which she dazzled as Satine, a singer at the famous Parisian nightclub who catches the eye of Ewan McGregor’s broke poet—a perfect movie for fans of glitzy musicals, like Cabaret and Chicago, or Luhrman’s excessive style, like in Romeo + Juliet.
The role earned Kidman her first nomination for Best Actress at the 2002 Academy Awards, where she lost to Halle Berry. Monster’s Ball might have won that battle, but Luhrmann’s musical undoubtedly won the war.
How’s this for a Sliding Doors moment: To Die For—the first great movie in the Kidman-verse and a must-watch for any fan—was originally offered to Meg Ryan, but, for some reason, the When Harry Met Sally actor turned it down. What luck.
By 1995, Kidman had achieved fame with roles in Days of Thunder and Far and Away alongside her future husband, Tom Cruise, but it was Gus Van Sant’s To Die For that took her career to the next level. Working on a script from Hollywood heavyweight Buck Henry, who had been inspired by the then-budding concept of televised courtroom trials, Kidman steals the show as Suzanne Stone, a weather reporter who dreams of becoming a Network newscaster and is willing to do whatever it takes to get there—up to and including having her husband killed.
Few actors have enjoyed the kind of run that Nicole Kidman went on at the beginning of the Millennium. Two years on from the success of Moulin Rouge!, and just months after winning Best Actress at the Oscars, Kidman returned to Cannes, in competition for the first time, with Lars von Trier’s Dogville—an incredible watch for fans of provocative, independent cinema. Don’t be put off by the Spartan setup; if you liked Kidman in Sacred Dear or are a fan of Von Trier’s Melancholia, this will be right up your alley.
For the Brechtian production, Von Trier uses practically no sets, just a spattering of props, weather effects and doors, leaving the actors to run the show. The cast contains Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Stellan Skarsgård, Ben Gazzara, and Patricia Clarkson, but Kidman more than holds her own. For further confirmation of her 2003 aura, check out the footage of her sparking up a cig with Skarsgård during the film’s press conference in Cannes, a moment of pure, messy ‘00s swag.
It feels kind of strange putting Birth on the top of this list given how much it borrows from Eyes Wide Shut, but then again, so much of Jonathan Glazer’s early work owes a debt to Stanley Kubrick—and if you are a fan of either of their movies (especially Eyes Wide and Under The Skin), I can’t recommend this criminally underseen movie enough. Regardless, more than 20 years since its release, Birth remains a uniquely beguiling film.
Kidman plays a wealthy New York widow who, on her birthday, is visited by a 10-year-old boy claiming to be her dead husband. (Can you imagine how jealous M. Night Shyamalan must have been of that idea?) Kidman, resplendent in a pixie cut, carries the film’s provocative sense of wonder in her fleeting expressions.
The slow zoom shot at the opera, during which the actor’s face does an agonised dance between fear, panic, and finally, ecstatic acceptance, is for me, the best single moment in her storied career so far.
