Nicole kidman

The constant parade of shocking and disturbing revelations from the Epstein files has been going on for a considerable time now. It shows no signs of coming to an end. Just when we all think that we’ve seen the worst of it, another 10,000 documents enter the public domain. Even though the stories have been widely disseminated, the details of the abuse of young women by the wealthy and powerful remain just as distressing – and scandalous – no matter how many times they are repeated. At some point in the future, Hollywood – or a streaming service, or AI, or however we get our entertainment by then – will probably make a film about the Epstein scandal.

The Perfect Couple is an exemplar of that genre sometimes cynically known as ‘poverty programming’: dramas that train all of us non-billionaire folk to be content with our miserable lot by showing us that even if we did have lots more money we’d actually really hate it. They’re all secretly messed up, treacherous and unfaithful, riddled with hatred, and popping pills It’s set on Nantucket Island, where the streets are cobbled and the old-moneyed families gather every summer to polish their bijou antique rowing boats at their beachside mansions which, I just checked, cost around £15 million.

Dear Stanley, Did I ever hear you laugh or see you smile? I like to think I amused you from time to time, but laughter was scarce among your responses. A pause was your applause. During the many months we worked together you were often friendly, always somber. You never hinted why. Private anguish was nobody else’s business; work its narcotic. Might it be that, throughout your life, success was as much revenge as pleasure? You seemed as much lonesome as autocrat; mark of the still photographer you first were; and the kid before that? As far as our script for Eyes Wide Shut was concerned, you apologized for not being able to specify what you wanted. You could promise only to recognize it when you saw it.

There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to appear in domestic-based thrillers. Last Sunday when HBO’s The Undoing began, Jonathan and Grace Fraser (Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman) seemed to have the happiest of middle-aged marriages. They still laughed at each other’s jokes. They still kept each other fully informed about the kind of day they’d had at work: he as a kindly child oncologist, she as an unfailingly wise therapist. Not only did they still have sex, but when they did, it wasn’t always in bed.True, they weren’t wholly without their problems. Their loving son Henry, for example, sometimes didn’t clean up after making smoothies.

Walking into the theater to see Bombshell — which recounts the high-profile sexual harassment cases that led to Roger Ailes’s ouster from Fox News — I felt a bit like a feline about to take in a showing of Cats. I was, after all, about to see a re-creation of the people and spaces that made up my work environment for the better part of two years. I started at Fox Business Network as a producer in October 2013 and stayed until March 2015, when I left to work for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign (please clap). During my time there, I only met Roger Ailes once, very briefly, and my main takeaway from that interaction was that I was taller than him in heels.

Nicole Kidman’s face is so familiar from the cover of People that we might forget that she can still play other people. In Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, Kidman plays people like us. Her character, Erin Bell, is haggard, unfit, and alcoholic, and a failure at work, marriage and parenting. Kidman is at her best when playing characters we dislike — the psychopathically ambitious weather girl in To Die For and the implausible spouse of Tom Cruise. Destroyer is Kidman at her intense and evocative best, as well as a proof of life that reinvents that venerable genre, the LA detective movie. It’s Chinatown all over again.