The glow within

Film is the art built out of a thousand crafts. Watch the credits roll for any film and you’ll see how many different contributions a good director needs to weave together. So when someone tells me the reason to see a film is some star’s performance in it, what I hear is, “The acting obscures the ways in which the rest of this film fails to work”.

The reason to see is Nicole Kidman’s performance in it, but here’s what’s curious: the film’s story is a tissue-thin concoction of hard-boiled crime clichés, the kind that falls apart in your mind as you leave the theatre, so that you wonder how it ever kept your interest. And yet it does its job. This isn’t a bad film propped up by great acting, it’s a film with precisely as much narrative cohesion as it needs, which, as it turns