Nicole Kidman

Not to be confused with the like-vintage "sword and sorcery" TV pilot of the same name, director Denny Lawrence's Archer's Adventure was lensed in Australia. Brett Climo plays Dave Power, a young and ambitious caretaker of a racehorse named Archer. In order to get Archer to the 1861 Melbourne Cup, where the horse must compete, Power takes him on a 600-mile Outback odyssey, fraught with excitement and peril. The horse then wins the race. Incredibly, this picaresque character study was based on a true story. Also known as Archer's Adventure, the film features 18-year-old Nicole Kidman in a crucial role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

PJ (Angelo D'Angelo), and Goose (James Lugton) are bored Australian BMX riders whose bikes have been totaled. Setting off on an intended fishing trip with their friend Judy (Nicole Kidman), they stumble instead upon a cache of stolen police walkie-talkies, which they decide to sell for new BMX gear. Unfortunately, the radios had orginally been swiped by a murderous gang of bank robbers, with whom they soon become entangled. With no more of a plot peg than this, BMX Bandits turns into a movie-long chase. It's nonthink entertainment, true, but the biking scenes are expertly photographed and edited, so you'll be more than happy to go along for the ride. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Nora Ephron directed and co-wrote this updated adaptation of a classic situation comedy that also casts a satirical eye on the entertainment industry. Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell) is a movie star whose career has been going into a slow and steady decline. Desperate for a project that will give his reputation a jump start, Jack agrees to star in a film version of the once-popular television series Bewitched as hapless hubby Darrin Stephens, under the condition that an unknown actress be cast as the female lead so he won't be upstaged. After auditioning dozens of women who fail to make the grade, Jack meets lovely and charming Isabel Bigelow (Nicole Kidman), and is immediately certain she's the perfect choice to play witch-turned-housewife Samantha. However, there's one thing neither Jack nor the producers of the film know -- Isabel really is a witch, and while she's been trying to get along without her powers to better fit in among mortals, she will use her special talents when need be. The film also stars Michael Caine as Isabel's father, Nigel, Shirley MacLaine as Iris Smythson (the actress hired to play Endora), and Jason Schwartzman as Jack's agent. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Directed by Jonathan Glazer, Birth takes place in New York's Upper East Side, where Anna (Nicole Kidman), a 35-year-old widow, resides. Just as Anna has shaken off what she thought were the final remnants of her old life -- she has even found love with a new man, Joseph (Danny Huston), whom she plans on marrying -- Sean (Cameron Bright), a ten-year-old boy, comes into her life insisting that he is the reincarnation of her late husband. Though she initially brushes off the boy's claims as the result of a crush on her, his grave demeanor and uncanny knowledge of her life leads Anna through a self-reevaluation that not only threatens her marital plans with Joseph (Huston), but also strains her relationship with her mother, Eleanor (Lauren Bacall). ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

An entertaining and exciting adventure story for any age, Bush Christmas, set in the Australian outback, has three tense situations developing along parallel lines: Ben (Peter Sumner) and Kate Thompson (Vineta O'Malley) have to pay off the mortgage on their homestead by January 1st or they lose everything; manager Bill (John Ewart) and lead singer Sly (John Howard) of a struggling outback band find themselves desperately broke and decide to "borrow" the Thompson's prize racehorse to run a few races and recoup their loses; and finally, the two Thompson children, Helen (Nicole Kidman at 15) and John (Mark Spain) along with a British cousin (James Wingrove) and a ranch hand Manalpuy (Manalpuy) decide to chase after the horse rustlers and retrieve the family's beloved stallion. Most of the film shows the two inept horse thieves trying to make their comic way across an inhospitable terrain, and the children braving unexpected dangers, as when they fall into an abandoned mine shaft that starts to fill up with water. When these various adventures are resolved, the Thompson family is faced with a final, fateful chance to pay off their mortgage by entering their recaptured racehorse in a New Year's Day cross-country race. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Grieving over the death of their son, a married couple decide to take a long yachting trip for relaxation's sake. Their journey takes a dark turn, however, when they rescue a young man from a drifting vessel. The couple soon discover that the other ship's crew had been brutally murdered by their new passenger, and find themselves in a battle of wits against this violent sociopath. Interestingly, a previous attempt had been made at adapting the novel that inspired this film by none other than Orson Welles; footage from his unfinished version, known as The Deep, can be seen in the documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide

The final work of legendary director Stanley Kubrick, who died within a week of completing the edit, stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, at the time Hollywood's most bankable celebrity couple, and was shot on a open-ended schedule (finally totaling over 400 days), with closed sets in London standing in for New York City. Cruise and Kidman play William and Alice Harford, a physician and a gallery manager who are wealthy, successful, and travel in a sophisticated social circle; however, a certain amount of decadence crosses their paths on occasion, and a visit to a formal-dress party leads them into sexual temptation when William is drafted into helping a beautiful girl who has overdosed on drugs while Alice is charmed by a man bent on seduction. While neither William and Alice act on their adulterous impulses, once the issue has been brought into the open, it begins a dangerous season of erotic gamesmanship for the couple, with William in particular openly confronting his desire for new sexual experiences. What didn't make the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut may have been as fascinating as what finally appeared on screen: Harvey Keitel was replaced almost immediately by Sydney Pollack, while Jennifer Jason Leigh was replaced by Marie Richardson after she had shot all her scenes and left town. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In the first of the 13 episodes comprising Five Mile Creek's first season, San Francisco-bred Maggie Scott (Louise Caire Clark) and her daughter Hannah (Priscilla Weems) arrive in the Australia of the 1860s, in search of Maggie's husband Adam, a prospector who'd headed "Down Under" during the territory's celebrated Gold Rush. Maggie and Hannah settle in Five Mile Creek, a community set up as a stagecoach stop, and quickly befriend local hotel owner Kate (Liz Wallace). At the same time, the Australian Express stagecoach service makes its maiden run, with co-owners Con (Jay Kerr) and Jack (Rod Mullinar) at the reigns. Despite the stiff resistance of their competitors and a variety of scurrilous "bushrangers", Con and Jack complete their first run with the help and moral support of Maggie, Kate and Kate's enigmatic Irish handyman Paddy (Michael Caton). In due time, big-hearted Kate will also rescue orphaned youngster Sam (Martin Lewis) from a life as a bandit (she'll also advertise for a husband in order to legally adopt the boy). Although overt violence is avoid during the series' inaugural season, there is action and suspense aplenty thanks to a variety of outlaws, claim jumpers and mysterious strangers. Midway through the season, Maggie becomes a widow, thereby opening up the possibility of a romance between herself and the headstrong Jack. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Australian filmmaker John Duigan followed up his captivating The Year My Voice Broke with Flirting. Noah Taylor repeats his "Danny" characterization from the earlier film, while Thandie Newton plays a Ugandan exchange student who attends an Australian girls boarding school. Billeted at a nearby boy's school, Danny finds himself falling in love with Newton, though he is frequently at a loss as to how to express himself. Flirting is the second in a proposed trilogy of John Duigan-directed films revolving around Danny's "awkward" years. Featured in the cast as one of Newton's schoolmates is Nicole Kidman. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Three young men leave behind a land in chaos to find new lives in a thoroughly different culture in this documentary. As the African nation of Sudan fell into political disarray near the dawn of the 21st century, with unspeakable violence following in its wake, thousands of refugees attempted to flee the country, making their way into Kenya in hopes of earning passage elsewhere. Jon Bul Dau, Daniel Abu Pach, and Panther Bior were three such people who eventually came to the United States, and filmmaker Christopher Quinn spent four years following them on their journey in a new and unfamiliar land. In God Grew Tired of Us, Quinn documents the young men as they struggle to build new lives for themselves, acquaint themselves with the "American" way of doing things, the difficulties of being black in a primarily white culture, and try to track down the friends and family they were forced to leave behind. God Grew Tired of Us received its North American premier at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival; actor Brad Pitt served as the film's executive producer. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Richard Trank's documentary I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal joins Into the Arms of Strangers, The Power of Good, and other recent nonfiction films that reflect on WWII-era individuals emotionally invested in the pursuit of justice. This heart-rending film concerns Wiesenthal, a concentration camp survivor released from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in 1945 on the verge of death from starvation. During his imprisonment, Wiesenthal dreamed of one day re-entering society and establishing himself as an architect, but the atrocities of the camp pointed Wiesenthal's life and career in a much different direction. When Wiesenthal returned to the outside world, with 89 of his family members exterminated by the Holocaust, he vowed to track down and bring to justice as many of the perpetrators of the Nazi atrocity as he could find - and spent years at this task, via a running list of the camp torturers, that he had secretly kept as a detainee. In the early years, with much of the world still ignorant of the extent of the Holocaust, Wiesenthal's was virtually a one-man operation, but in time, he joined forces with the American War Crimes Unit and U.S. Army War Crimes Committee to see the task through to fruition. All told, Wiesenthal helped incriminate an astonishing 1,100 individuals, including the leaders of the Sobibor and Treblinka camps, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele - and his overarching goal, astonishingly, was not cold blooded revenge but a simple love of humanity - the need to free future generations from the dark shadow of the Nazi threat. To create this film in Wiesenthal's memory, Trank and his crew travel to multiple continents, and film exclusive interviews with those whose lives were touched by Wiesenthal, as well as Wiesenthal's descendants; they intercut this interview footage with rare archival footage of Wiesenthal. Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman narrates. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Chanel head Karl Lagerfeld not only qualifies as one of the most resonantly successful and influential fashion designers of the late 20th century, but one of the most defiantly elusive. With the documentary portrait Lagerfeld Confidential, filmmaker Rodolphe Marconi attempts to change this status. For this film, Marconi gained rare and exclusive one-time access to the designer, and posits a series of direct onscreen questions to Lagerfeld about his famously clandestine personal life, and his towering career in collaboration with such fashion giants as Pierre Balmain, Jean Patou, Repetto, Mario Valentino and many others. Marconi spent two years shooting Lagerfeld (at the mercy of the designer's discretion about what was and wasn't filmed) and edited some 200 hours of Super 8 and HD Footage down to feature length. In the finished film, Marconi repeatedly cuts back-and-forth between candidly shot on-location footage - of Lagerfeld photographing models and actress Nicole Kidman, sketching out dress designs, mounting and coordinating catwalks - and interview footage wherein Lagerfeld reflects at length on his upbringing, his career, his world views, and his proclivities (including atheism and active homosexuality since the age of 13). Deliberately or indeliberately, Marconi avoids extended discussion with Lagerfeld's critics and rivals in the fashion industry. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide