You don't kick a dingo when he's down (or maybe you do, to dislodge the baby from its jaws? We always forget), but Nicole Kidman has done just that by piling on the beleaguered Australia.

After a botched press tour, a less-than-rapturous box office take, and a tarring of director Baz Luhrmann as the new "black hole of cinema" (to say nothing of the bounty set on Kidman's ovaries), most of the film's principal players would be content to lay low and make no more noise until Australia begins its DVD afterlife. An insecure Kidman, however, only added more fuel to the bonfire when she confessed that she typically doesn't watch her own films, and being forced to sit through Australia made her "squirm."

Miss Kidman, who attended the premiere with country singer husband Keith Urban, said: 'I can't look at this movie and be proud of what I've done.

'I sat there and I looked at Keith and went "Am I any good in this movie?"

'But I thought Brandon Walters (an 11-year-old Aboriginal boy) and Hugh Jackman were wonderful.

'It's just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all.'

Fortunately for Kidman, she only has one more of her upcoming performances to sit through: Nine, in which the Weinstein Co's breakthrough advances in crotch-veil technology can be expanded upon to produce a private version where Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, and Fergie interact with a six-foot-tall, Botoxed sheath.