Latest news with #TheStepfordWives
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nicole Kidman Posts Rare Pic with Her Mother & Two Daughters
Mother's Day certainly brought all of the feels for all of our favorite royals, actors and celebrities—including Nicole Kidman, who took to Instagram to post a sweet picture with her mother, Janelle, and her daughters, Faith (14) and Sunday (16). Sharing a picture of the family vacationing in Uluru, aka Ayers Rock in Australia, Kidman cheerfully captioned the post,"My mother and my daughters in Uluru, beautiful memories…always. Happy Mother's Day." The comments were equally sweet, with fans leaving adoring messages such as "beautiful family" and heart-eye emojis. Kidman, who is married to singer Keith Urban, expressed just how much the people in her life mean to her at the 49th AFI Life Achievement Award Gala in 2024, telling the crowd, "Right there is the love of my life, and the loves of my life. My daughters have never been anywhere publicly with me on a red carpet, tonight was their first night, so they're here, Sunday and Faith. And then there's all my nieces and nephews and my sissy and my beautiful aunt and her husband, who's our family now. And this is all because of you, and I love you so much. So there's no place like home, as they say. You're my home. And thank you for flying halfway across the world." Aside from spending time with the fam, Kidman is also enjoying the release of her latest film Holland, which has received a rave review from Senior Commerce Editor, Stephanie Maida. "The beginning of the movie reminded me of yet another Kidman classic: The Stepford Wives,' Maida writes in her review. "Kidman always nails it as a woman on the brink, while Macfadyen and García Bernal stepped into their roles perfectly—the former an aggravatingly cloying husband with a penchant for 'boops' on the nose, the latter, a nerve-wracked man who'll do anything for love." A wonderful Mother's Day, a new movie and breaking the internet with a bold, pantless look—Nicole Kidman is absolutely living her best life. Kate Middleton Was Just Spotted Carrying Her Favorite $450 Handbag (Again) PureWow's editors and writers have spent more than a decade shopping online, digging through sales and putting our home goods, beauty finds, wellness picks and more through the wringer—all to help you determine which are actually worth your hard-earned cash. From our PureWow100 series (where we rank items on a 100-point scale) to our painstakingly curated lists of fashion, beauty, cooking, home and family picks, you can trust that our recommendations have been thoroughly vetted for function, aesthetics and innovation. Whether you're looking for travel-size hair dryers you can take on-the-go or women's walking shoes that won't hurt your feet, we've got you covered.
Arab News
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Review: Nicole Kidman's ‘Holland' is an underwhelming thriller
LONDON: If you think there's something unnervingly familiar about 'Holland,' then you're in good company. In this new thriller from Prime Video, directed by Mimi Cave (2022's excellent 'Fresh'), Nicole Kidman plays a permanently frowning wife who just can't quite shake the feeling that something about her picture-perfect life isn't quite right – which, when you think about it, could also be the logline for the actor's turns in 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Big Little Lies,' 'Expats,' 'The Perfect Couple' and probably a half dozen others. This time, Kidman's Nancy suspects that her optometrist husband Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) may be having an affair. We don't really ever find out why she thinks this, beyond the fact that she has 'a feeling' and suffers from weird, surreal dreams in which the town they live in — the titular Holland, Michigan — merges with the model village Fred is building in their garage. So, despite having no obvious reason to do so, Nancy and her work colleague-turned-extramarital crush Dave (Gael García Bernal) decide to follow Fred to find out what he's up to. The setup for discovering Fred's secret takes up the majority of the movie. Macfadyen, here simply playing a more homely version of his character in 'Succession,' makes for an entertaining enough man of mystery while, for the most part, Kidman and García Bernal are fine as co-workers with an obvious attraction and a shared interest in what Fred is really up to. The main problem with 'Holland' is eccentricity for eccentricity's sake — Cave plays up the town's Dutch colonial traditions seemingly because they just lend an air of unfamiliarity and weirdness, Nancy's feelings of dread manifest in those surreal dreams, but none of it has any real-world relevance beyond making for some odd-looking visuals. The twist, when it inevitably comes, feels disproportionate and overblown given the small-town buildup. Elements, such as Dave's experience as the only immigrant in town, or Nancy's issues with their babysitter, are mentioned once and never touched on again. The film suffers from too many vague ideas at the outset, before dumping most of them to make way for the most shocking story arc. Turns out, not only have we seen this film a bunch of times before, we've seen it done a lot better too.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Holland review – twisty Nicole Kidman thriller is a disappointing mess
Nicole Kidman is, in general, providing a public service with her seemingly inexhaustible energy. She's been working consistently with female directors – 19 in the last eight years – while also attempting to rescue the tight domestic thrillers of yore and consistently probing the gap between women's placid public facades and private turmoil. The quality of Kidman's performances – and she is almost always delivering something a little weird, a little off and very magnetic – does not indicate the quality of the project, which can range from the provocative (if underwhelming) Babygirl to her personal beach-read cinematic universe of mediocre TV roles. Holland, Kidman's latest film as a star and producer (under her Blossom Films banner), finds Kidman in a familiar groove: a suburban housewife with secrets and suspicions, beset by paranoia and straining to keep up appearances. Like many a Kidman character before her, Nancy Vandergroot projects perfection – china-doll smile, coiffed hair, nuclear family dinners – and nurses big feelings about the small stakes of her fishbowl environ. The trailer, released ahead of the SXSW film festival by distributor Amazon Prime Video, promises a Kidman performance in the lane of The Stepford Wives – eerie, brittle and unnerving, with the added weirdness of the Dutch iconography of Holland, Michigan, an idyllic lakeside town locally famous for its annual tulip festival. In practice, it squanders the talents of its star, especially for this particular brand of unsettling, on a bizarrely paced script that adds up to nothing. A thriller more in intention than execution, Holland certainly looks stylish, owing to sharp direction by Mimi Cave, whose 2022 debut feature Fresh deftly weaved the travails of modern dating into sly and gnarly horror. Working this time with a script from Andrew Sodroski – one that bounced around Hollywood for nearly a decade, seemingly for good reason – Cave, a longtime director of music videos, once again demonstrates a keen eye for the portent in the mundane, but struggles to wring suspense out of a story that flounders about for a full 80 minutes for quickly accelerating and then stalling out. Those first 80 minutes center Nancy's suspicion that her husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen), an optometrist who is either at work or chipping away at an elaborate model train set with their son, Harry (Jude Hill), is having an affair, based on seemingly nothing but vibes and possible manic paranoia. In the effort to prove her husband is unfaithful, Nancy, a home economics teacher at the local high school, becomes entangled with her colleague Dave (an underused Gael García Bernal), a Mexican immigrant who experiences racism when it is necessary to the plot. The deeper Nancy and Dave go into their amateur investigation – and, as more than half of a movie that feels longer than its 108 minutes, it's a remarkably shallow deep – the more Nancy's manicured world crumbles around her, most provocatively in a handful of nightmare sequences where Cave flexes her capabilities for the surreal. Though the script was initially set in the present, Cave decided to set the film in the year 2000, if for no other reason than some gentle nostalgia pull and the convenient location of Nancy's sleuthing somewhere between the analog (breaking into his office, old receipts) and the nascent digital (texting on Nokia phones, Ask Jeeves). Sodroski chose to set the story in Holland, seemingly because people smiling in wooden clogs and pointy hats makes for a particularly creepy facade of normalcy. Cave, who grew up outside Chicago, makes better work of standard midwestern kitsch – Little Caesars pizza and ceramic figurines in glass containers, floral wallpapers and ketchup designs on meatloaf – than the town traditions, filmed as if straining for unease. Still, there's a discernible gap between the quality of the visuals, the chilling atmosphere of destabilizing suspicion that Cave conjures, and the actual material, which is as flimsy as one of Nancy's Dutch hats. Kidman is predictably effective in 'honest to gosh' housewife mode, diving into Nancy's fixations with typical full commitment. But both women are underserved by this story that goes fully off the rails in the second half. No spoilers, but suffice to say some twists and heel-turns feel unearned to the point of audience annoyance, all blanketed with a vague question of what's real and what's not that's more of a cop out than a complication. Which is a shame – Holland has all the parts of a classic domestic thriller, the type that made Kidman's career and which movie fans still miss. In the final sum of the Kidman oeuvre, I suspect this will be but a footnote. If nothing else, though, it's more evidence of a larger, worthwhile project. Holland is screening at the SXSW film festival and will be available on Amazon Prime on 27 March
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Stepford Wives at 50: a compelling idea in search of a better movie
The funniest running joke in The Stepford Wives, a horror/satire about a village teeming with glamorous homemakers with pristine kitchens and serene grins, is that the men are all wildly overmatched. They're like the nerds who got the prom queens, except even nerds have an expected level of intelligence and personality, however socially awkward they might appear. These drips are better understood as nondescript: a few of them are balding and another has a speech impediment, but they are united mostly in feeling entitled to the docile beauty their junior executive salaries should afford them. When two women new to town overhear a Stepford wife in the throes of passion – 'You're the king, Frank!' – they know something's up. Adapted from novelist Ira Levin's follow-up to Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives has enjoyed a robust cultural shelf-life in the 50 years since the original 1975 version, but it's always been more potent as an idea than a work of art in any form. (The less said about the 2004 adaptation, a noxious camp comedy starring Nicole Kidman, the better.) It was a direct influence on the brilliant Jordan Peele horror-comedy Get Out and the not-so-brilliant Olivia Wilde thriller Don't Worry Darling, which each take place in 'idyllic' communities founded on sinister social engineering. Referring to someone as a 'Stepford wife' has become a convenient shorthand for compliant women who puts the needs of men above their own desires and ambitions. (Amy Dunne in Gone Girl referred to such regressive types in her 'Cool Girl' speech.) As a cultural object, The Stepford Wives remains a fascinating barometer of a country still reacting to a women's liberation movement that was redefining gender roles and upending conventional relationships. The village of Stepford is a symbol of patriarchal resistance, imagining what might happen if garden-variety misogyny were taken to the furthest extreme. What's particularly potent about this fantasy is the idea of converting independent, cosmopolitan women into compliant housewives. It's not enough for these men to want fantasy babes. They want to triumph over progress, too. After breaking through as a young actor in two benchmarks of the late 60s, The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Katharine Ross was in her mid-30s when she was cast as Joanna Eberhart in The Stepford Wives, and she keys in on the restlessness of her character. Joanna is the mother of two small children and married to Walter (Peter Masterson), a bland but stable businessman who has cajoled her into leaving Manhattan for this village in Connecticut. She likes the city and wants to be a successful photographer, but the time on that dream is running out and she doesn't seem to have the energy to fight Walter about fleeing to the space and tranquility of Connecticut. Once in Stepford, however, Joanna soon becomes unnerved over the gussied-up women in frilly dresses who keep beautiful homes and have recommendations for great recipes and household products, but are otherwise empty domestic goddesses. She eventually finds another independent thinker in Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) and the two attempt to start up a women's group as a response to the Stepford Men's Association, a secretive organization that has lured Walter as its latest recruit. A series of bizarre incidents lead Joanna and Bobbie to believe that something disturbing has happened to the other wives in Stepford, but they have to unravel the conspiracy before it unravels them. Scripted by the white-hot screenwriter William Goldman, who won the Oscar for Butch Cassidy and would win again a year later with All the President's Men, The Stepford Wives tries to function as a satirical Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but its British director, Bryan Forbes (Séance on a Wet Afternoon), doesn't have the energy for it. The film is neither as chilling nor as funny as it intends to be, and only fitfully offers tantalizing glimpses of what might have been. Given the scope of the conspiracy – not to mention the immense creep factor – The Stepford Wives should crackle with paranoia and tension, but Forbes's instinct is to underplay everything. Only the frisky, wisecracking Prentiss seems to understand the assignment. Yet those standout moments are enough to account for why The Stepford Wives hasn't faded away. The sequences where the Stepford women glitch are simultaneously hilarious and unsettling, like when one downplays a fender bender at the grocery store by repeating the same line on a loop ('This is all so silly') and does so again at a party, when she tells the guests, 'I'll just die if I don't get this recipe,' and it seems literally true. And though Joanna's pursuit of the truth isn't the white-knuckle affair Forbes wants it to be, her confrontation with her own facsimile is an unforgettable shock. Her doppelgänger is 'perfect' for extracting her personality and soul, and just keeping her available body. That no women were involved in any iteration of The Stepford Wives accounts for some of its problems, too. As much as the story is about what misogynists want from their partners – 'I like to watch women doing little domestic chores,' says the leader of the Men's Association – there's a reason why feminists didn't embrace the 1975 version and why recent films directed by women like Don't Worry Darling and Barbie have used the Stepford influence to their own ends. After a half-century, The Stepford Wives continues to be a great conceit in perpetual need of a rewrite.
