We sometimes forget how much opera provides a captivating alternative to classic drama but this was written all over Opera Australia’s Verdi Gala concert with Nicole Car which was such a triumph the other week. And it’s pretty obviously the rationale for Angelina Jolie’s inhabitation of the role of Callas in her epic Maria. And then there are the classics of our civilisation which are not opera though they have shared elements. It will be fascinating to see what Ian Michael – the inheritor of an ancient indigenous culture – makes of the intense drama of Troy when it opens in Tom Wright’s adaptation of the world of Homer’s Iliad at the Malthouse in September.

What an extraordinarily energised career Nicole Kidman has had. Let’s be in no doubt about the fact that on a good day Nicole Kidman is an extraordinary actress.

And in her recent film Babygirl she gives the greatest performance of her career since To Die For – that Gus Van Sant film which showed Nicole Kidman was as great an actor as Maggie Smith.

Babygirl gets described as an S&M film but that gives little clue to its power, its strangeness and its sheer intensity of feeling. Nicole Kidman is a power woman of business who has other human beings for breakfast. She is married to Antonio Banderas, grizzled with patches of white beard, and a worried man as they toy with having sex with her head under a pillow.

Then she meets Harris Dickinson and is kindled beyond all sanity. He tells her to get down on her knees, he tells her to take off her panties. He has a sort of bruised innocence that makes her need for abasement seem like a destiny even as her response admits of every quaver of doubt and hesitancy so that we watch this beautiful assured woman willing herself toward an exquisite torment that she can neither live with nor without.

Nicole Kidman is magnificent as she faces the riddle of her contradictions. This is lightyears away from the big gesture histrionic power play of a Cate Blanchett. In Babygirl Nicole Kidman is not remotely big, her performance is exquisite, diamond sharp, a supreme paradox in miniature. The delicacy of the tightrope she walks is desperate and desolated even as it registers moment by moment what a life-and-death bargain she is playing with her deepest needs. The effect is breathtaking.

Harris Dickinson rises to meet her. He is like the dark incarnation of the beauty of youth and his boyishness is the exact complement to what she needs and fears and the contradictory bridge between the two states. But he is a young male actor whose acting is utterly commanding with not an inch of flab or flamboyance.

Halina Reijn directs with a consummate sense of style that ensures that its bareness is full of exact feeling even at the edge of mystery. The young woman in the office who realises Nicole Kidman is defying the reality of the world is Australia’s Talk To Me star Sophie Wilde – rapid, assured and likeable. Ewan McGregor’s daughter Esther McGregor is lovely here and Antonio Banderas gives an utterly credible performance as the harassed husband.

But Babygirl has performances contemporary movie-making scarcely deserves.

What will Troy be like when it emerges at the Malthouse in September?

When the film Troy was made in 2004 Eric Bana who played Hector said in dinkum terms, ‘Orlando Bloom plays me brother and Peter O’Toole plays me father.’ It was a pity Wolfgang Petersen was persuaded to have the king of Troy called ‘Preum’ which however accurate it may be is a departure from the traditional English pronunciation ‘Pry-um’.

Peter O’Toole was seventy-odd when he played the role. He had always seemed the ideal choice to play Achilles. You could hear his voice behind Christopher Logue’s 1960s meta-translation: ‘The arid bliss self-righteousness provokes / addled my heart.’In the movie of Troy Achilles is played by Brad Pitt, and his former wife Angelina Jolie has just made a film about that stormy Greek-American who was one of the greatest singer actors who ever lived, Maria Callas.

Maria is a strange bewilderment of a film in which the dazzling Hollywood star lipsynchs a great number of the famous Callas arias from the ‘Habanera’ in Carmen to ‘Vissi d’arte’ in Tosca.

Callas, of course, made one overt gesture in the direction of the drama of the Greeks when she did Medea – the Euripides plot augmented by Seneca or whatever – for Pasolini and the upshot is full of grandeur and terror.

So, in its way, is Maria – directed by Pablo Larraín – though we’re never quite sure how much of the action is real and how much is imagined. Kodi Smit-McPhee, for instance, plays a film director called Mandrax with stately attention: he recently played Konstantin to Cate Blanchett’s Arkadina on the London stage. He is at once young and ageless but Mandrax is also the name of one of the drugs Callas is addicted to in her Paris hideaway – ministered to her by her devoted butler Pierfrancesco Favino and housekeeper Alba Rohrwache.

The script is by Steven Knight who wrote Rogue Heroes and Peaky Blinders. He has a feeling for the shadow world of recollection and we see Callas in great brocaded theatres just as we see her with Onassis, with German army officers in Athens in the 1940s, with JFK. She ponders how Marilyn could make such an impact with ‘Happy Birthday’ when she had no voice. She wonders how Frank Sinatra could make three times as much money as her.

The arias are given with the original language lyrics – French for Carmen, Italian for Norma and for most things – but with no translation. They are very grand and the biographical detail is at once distinct and moving as we count the days and the hours.

Perhaps it’s unfair to say that Angelina Jolie’s wan beauty lacks the vivacity of the final clips of Callas, the warmth that is palpably reaching out but then Maria is a saga of last days. It is moving in its stateliness and a bit marmoreal, like a tragic heroine in quest of a tombstone.

The relationship between the detail of the life and this doomed spectral afterglow is expertly scripted but how strange it is that great performers have become such legends that their successors want to impersonate them.