He was also the scriptwriter and producer of the movies which he directed and would occasionally, as in the case of the 1965 Orestis Laskos film Praktores 005 enantion Hrysopodarou, write screenplays for other directors.

[1][2] Despite a lukewarm reaction by viewers, critics appreciated the innovative perspective on the classic Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice and noted the originality of Nikolaidis' artistic techniques.

[3] For his next picture, The Wretches Are Still Singing (1979), the director studied the transformation of social values using the example of a group of five friends who meet after a long separation and share with each other the details of their difficult lives.

Today he is probably best known for his 1990 magnum opus Singapore Sling, a bizarre mix of film noir and horror with sex being used as a power game.

As an example of the last tendency, the "Years of Cholera" trilogy which deals with the last decades of the twentieth century begins with The Wretches Are Still Singing (1979), continues with Sweet Bunch (1983), and ends with The Loser Takes It All (2002).

In November 2005, after the completion of his last film The Zero Years, a tale of perversion and sexual dominance which failed to replicate the earlier success of Singapore Sling (1990), Nikolaidis declared his intention to stop making movies in order to deal with music.

The work of Nikos Nikolaidis has had a significant influence on the subsequent generation of Greek filmmakers some of which were inspired by the stylistics of his films and the unusual artistic images containing complex allegories and symbols.