Birth (2004)

Nicole Kidman plays a woman who believes her dead husband has come back to her as a ten-year-old boy. It's bat-shit crazy in one way for the first half of the film, and bat-shit crazy in an entirely different way for the second half, and I preferred the first half. It felt like a disturbing grown-up fairy tale before it becomes an improbable psychological drama. But it's both beautiful and horrific throughout and Nicole Kidman is not just good, she's great. It's her type of role, or rather, the type of role that I like to see her play, similar, in some ways, to the frightened mother she played in The Others.

I have no objections to directors lifting shots and sequences from other directors. My favorite contemporary filmmaker is Tarantino so clearly it doesn't bother me, but the full-on Kubrick worship in this film was a little much. Director Jonathan Glazer clearly idolizes him and there are multiple shot-lifts and homages. It was just noticeable, I guess, and doubly noticeable when the film hedged its bets in the second-act, something that Kubrick never did.