Harris Dickinson Double Feature

Halina Reijn's Babygirl is thrilling from start to finish and completely sexy. It’s also incredibly, bracingly smart about sex, consent, eroticism, pleasure, and power. 

What a genius screenplay! There’s this brilliant sequence near the end of act three in which the protagonist’s assistant, Esme, gives this corporatized speech about acceptance, radical honesty, trust, and truly listening to one another “as women” or showing our true selves to one another or something like that. This character really believes it too. But Babygirl’s director places it at just a spot where all of its high moral tones are shown to be completely false. This is done in a subtle, extraordinary way in the screenplay, and it’s these kinds of small touches that make Babygirl an extraordinary event. 

I haven’t yet mentioned Nicole Kidman but… she tears into this role. This is as brave as she’s ever been and she’s done some powerfully brave work in her career. She is just outstanding.

This is supposed to be a Harris Dickinson double-feature post, so I would be remiss in not mentioning him. He's just great in Babygirl. In a movie that is truly the Nicole Kidman show, he still managed to stand out, and his work in this film is mysterious and troubling, and he's just great.

I also caught Steve McQueen's Blitz (this is on AppleTV+). Dickinson has a small role in this—considering what a star he is, I was genuinely surprised to see him in such a small supporting part. Blitz is good. It’s a kind of old-school, classic London-in-wartime picture where a parent and child are trying to find one another and getting into an odyssey of adventures that flesh out a compelling portrait of London and its residents during the blitz, when the Germans bombed civilian London. 

The difference with this version of that story is that it really focuses on Black London and Black-and-white London in a way I’ve never seen before in a movie about this period. This aspect of Blitz really sets it apart and makes it special. In most other ways, though, McQueen's movie just feels quite conventional, and I had trouble shaking the feeling—whether correct or not—that I’ve seen this all before.

The scores for both Babygirl and Blitz are both excellent. And I've been listening to both of them since I saw these movies. They're also both finalists for the Original Score Oscar, but I can't say I expect either of them to emerge with nominations next Thursday.