At The Movies: Babygirl not that hot, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl a quaint charmer

Babygirl (R21)

114 minutes, opens on Jan 2
★★★☆☆

The story: Nicole Kidman won the best actress award at the 2024 Venice Film Festival for her performance of a chief executive who risks everything for an affair with an office intern (Harris Dickinson) half her age.

At stake for Kidman’s Romy Mathis in the American psychosexual thriller Babygirl are her gilded career, heading a New York robotics company, and her loving home with two teen daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly) and a husband (Antonio Banderas).

She has Banderas and she is still unfulfilled?

English actor Dickinson (Triangle Of Sadness, 2022), 28, is admittedly quite a stud as paramour Samuel. Their mutual attraction is instant and intense.

The liaison is nevertheless about control rather than sex. “You want to be told what to do,” he intuits, his insolence a turn-on. Yes, siree, she does. Keeping up an icy take-charge persona is hard work, and so, in shabby motels, the lady boss submits to Samuel’s role-play degradations by getting down on all fours to lap a saucer of milk like a cat.

Kidman very skilfully navigates the tangle of pleasure, trepidation and shame, but their age-inappropriate dom-sub workplace relationship is not as shocking as the movie thinks it is, nothing like Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader’s transgressive perversity in Secretary (2002).

It is hard not to giggle at their fifty shades of kinky grey when Samuel starts feeding her cookies too, like a dog.

This erotica by Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies, 2022) may in fact be best appreciated as a satire on corporate gender dynamics, one that resists moralising or judging the heroine as she reconciles with her repressed desires.

Hot take: The co-stars’ chemistry is obscene, but the story is nothing to get worked up over.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (PG)

82 minutes, premieres on Netflix on Jan 3
★★★★☆

The story: The latest creation of eccentric middle-aged cheese-loving inventor Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead) goes rogue, and he is framed for a series of crimes only his loyal, long-suffering beagle Gromit can solve.

Nifty Odd-Jobbing Robot, or Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), is a smart gnome pre-programmed for home improvement, and Wallace has quite the business, renting it out around his neighbourhood in 1960s Northern England to pay the bills.

Never did he expect the return of an old foe.

Aardman Animations’ Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl co-directed by Academy Award-winning series creator Nick Park is his second British stop-motion feature comedy after The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit (2005) and a sequel to the short The Wrong Trousers (1993), where diabolical penguin Feathers McGraw first appeared, disguised as a chicken.

Foiled by Wallace and Gromit, the interloper has since been hatching his revenge from a high-security zoo across town. Cinema’s inventory of villains has none more sinister than this inscrutable jailbird with his dead eyes: He hacks into Norbot and engineers an army of evil gnome-bots for mayhem.

The escapade, a spoof of the James Bond and Mission: Impossible films, gently cautions against modern society’s over-reliance on artificial intelligence. It sets an example by remaining a quaint charmer of silly colloquial puns and ingenious sight gags, as top dog Gromit again battles the dark forces because Chief Inspector Mackintosh (Peter Kay) is still a bumbler.

The tactile, lovingly hand-crafted plasticine animation is a marvel. Even Wallace comes to see there are “some things a machine just can’t do”.

Hot take: Thirty-six years on and claymation’s favourite double act is as ever a treat.