new Thomson biography of Nicole Kidman reflects on the ways films, and sometimes their stars, seduce us 

In “Nicole Kidman” (Knopf), a 284-page meditation on “the bravest, the most adventurous, and the most varied (actress) of her time,” film critic David Thomson describes one less-than-successful Kidman project (“The Human Stain,” Robert Benton’s 2003 adaptation of the Philip Roth novel) as full of errors and holes, but also “decent, distinguished, and moving.”

That’s also an apt description of Thomson’s book, which suffers from its own errors and holes. Errors of judgment, including the 65-year-old critic’s oft-repeated queasiness about actresses on the far side of 40, by his reckoning a remote and nearly fatal shore to which Kidman will be exiled next June. Holes where his internal critic (or the book’s editor) should be, to save him from his excesses. But like Kidman herself, Thomson still manages to dazzle, especially when the subject is the countless ways that moving pictures move us.

Film has few observers as astute as Thomson, or lovers as ardent, something borne out in page after page of his best-known book, “A Biographical Dictionary of Film,” first published in his native England in 1975 and now in its fourth edition. Thomson’s is an opinionated OED, a compendium of thumb-nail sketches and incisive assessments of a century’s worth of auteur and artists, moguls and movie stars that Atlantic Monthly has rightly described as “a reference book of extraordinary literary merit.”

If one of the larger-than-life qualities we enjoy about movie stars is that they are better-looking than we are, a critic’s role is to be better-seeing—to see more clearly than we do, to understand more fully, and then to articulate his or her vision more passionately.

Here’s what Thomson saw in Nicole Kidman in 2002, when the most recent edition of the Biographical Dictionary was published, shortly before the release of “The Hours,” for which she would win the Oscar: “There may be some limits to her talent, still, but in ambition and emotional energy—and in her sheer lust for the camera—she is a true star and a liberated force.” Rather than a conventional biography or a tell-all exposé, this book, then, is an effort to understand these qualities, to explore their origins and describe their impact.

Yet while Kidman’s name is in the title and her lovely face is on the book jacket, Thomson’s larger subject is really us, and “what happens to anyone beholding an actress—the spectator, the audience, or ourselves in any of our voyeur roles. And the most important thing in that vexed transaction is the way the actress and the spectator must remain strangers. That’s how the magic works. ... There cannot be this pitch of irrational desire without that rigorous apartness.”

So in between chapters on Kidman’s early years in Australia, her breakthrough performances in the 1989 thriller “Dead Calm” (which brought her to America and into the life of Tom Cruise) and the 1995 dark comedy “To Die For” (which brought her talents more clearly into focus, as well as her taste for risk), and a sensitive portrait of the apparent folie à trois that was Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” (and one which does not praise Kidman by patronizing Cruise), Thomson pauses to watch us, watching, and to consider “the principle of hopeless desire, and endless hope, on which movies are founded.”

Unfortunately, Thomson pauses for a lot of other things, as well. He keeps close tabs on the tabloids, and is a little too ready to trade in rumor and speculation, including three breathless did-she-or-didn’t-she pages spent wondering whether Kidman has used botox. Thomson’s fixation on 40 reflects a hard truth about industry founded on fantasy. “Men in Hollywood take it for granted with each other that they are all keeping their eye open for the new girl,” Thomson declares flatly (more evidence, were it needed, in support of Martin Mull’s theory that “Hollywood is like high school with money”). What’s unsettling is that Thomson can sound like one of these men, leaning against the lockers and rating the girls in the freshman class, while complaining how Meg Ryan’s “looks (have) suffered” or Elizabeth Shue’s alleged weight problem. He worries that Kidman, “the person who loves to be photographed, who loves to pretend,” is as worried as he is about her impending birthday.

Maybe so, but judging by her latest film, “Fur”—Steven Shainberg’s  “imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus,” which was shown at September’s Telluride by the Sea Film Festival in Portsmouth and which opens Friday in limited release—Kidman hasn’t lost the adventurous streak, nor (Thomson must be relieved to discover) her exquisite figure. And writing Nicole Kidman also allowed him to rediscover something that his own six decades of watching and writing about film “had largely blown away ... that pictures belong to actors, and to us, and they make a strange phantom love affair between us.”