Saw EYES WIDE SHUT in a dreamy 35mm print at the Prince Charles yesterday for the first time in decades. What struck me most this time around is how inadequate Tom Cruise is in the role. Nicole Kidman is alive, beautiful, sexy, she’s first flirty and drunk, then awakened by desire, traumatised by dreams, later multi-tasking and maternal, intelligent and vulnerable. The film deflates when she’s off-screen. Cruise is handsome, charismatic, a film star. But he’s not a doctor happily in love with his wife who gets awakened to darker desires he can’t comprehend but needs to chase. He should be someone whose unconscious is propulsing him with a magnet to his crotch. Instead, he comes across as a callow, self-centred narcissist rehearsing a future Mission Impossible sprint in walk mode. He does the first bits well and they are part of the role. But there should be so much more. A fascinating but ultimately unsatisfying film overpraised by the Kubrickistas. The orgy scenes verge on the funny.

José Arroyo