Black Swan

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

(R)

***

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Darren Aronofsky has long sought to convince us that great art requires great suffering, said David Denby in The New Yorker. In his “often ridiculous,” sometimes “startlingly beautiful” new ballet film, the director of 2008’s The Wrestler pushes that myth too far. An emaciated Natalie Portman stars as a ballerina driven over the edge by the chance to dance the lead in Swan Lake. As the character subjects herself to various extremes of physical and psychological self-abnegation, Black Swan becomes less a dance drama than “a movie about the torture of a young woman.” But “everything about classical ballet lends itself to excess,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. People once had complaints about The Red Shoes, but “they were wrong” to take the story in that dance-film masterpiece so literally, and they’d be wrong in this case, too. This “dementedly entertaining” movie works not in spite of its hackneyed ideas about art’s cost but because of its “sluttish predilection” for toying with them, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Portman’s “smashing, bruising, totally committed performance” makes the result “all the more jolting and powerful.”