Black Swan is a beautiful, poetic film that manages to surpass expectations through unforgettable images, an unbelievable performance, and exquisite direction, all of which that propel the film beyond its somewhat-ordinary premise.

Black Swan rests upon an incredible performance from Natalie Portman, who plays Nina, an experienced ballet dancer who lives with her mother (Barbara Hershey) in New York. Her company is preparing for a production of Swan Lake, the famous ballet by Tchaikovsky in which a princess is transformed into a beautiful white swan. The story ends as her true love is stolen from her by the black swan, and the protagonist takes her own life. The trick is that one ballerina must play both parts: the graceful, precise White Swan as well as the unpredictable, sensuous Black Swan. And although Nina is perfect for the White Swan, she lacks the passion required for the other half of the part, which is a great fit for Lily (Mila Kunis), a newcomer who quickly grabs the attention of the director (Vincent Cassel).

The bulk of the film rests upon Portman’s shoulders alone, who is definitely up to the task. The rest of the cast are also great, but don’t have nearly as much screentime. The movie is really a character study of Nina, and follows her transformation, both literally and figuratively. Portman is not only perfect for the meek, fragile girl that the main character begins as, but also shows her versatility as Nina explores a darker side of herself. More impressive is how much of her performance is non-verbal. For many scenes in which she is by herself we must rely on facial expressions and body language to understand the character’s feelings. This subtle touch really makes Nina stand out as her own character and externalizes Nina’s feelings so that the audience can understand the motivations and conflicts that drive her. The sheer physicality of the role is also an extraordinary feat. Portman and Kunis both must act as well as perform ballet alongside world-class dancers. This normally requires years of training, but these two actresses were able to master convincing ballet in just a few months.

And the ballet elements are vital to the film. The incredible choreography of the ballet is there not only for spectacle, but compliments the main story. From the opening dream sequence all the way to the thrilling conclusion, director Darren Aronofsky and director of photography Matthew Libatique imbue the film with beauty and an unmistakeable energy. The ballet sequences are particularly spectacular, as the camera weaves its way in and out of the dancers, taking the audience on-stage with the performers. The film takes the art form of ballet and enhances it by filming it in an exciting, energetic way. The direction is also key in providing the mystical, eerie feeling that pervades the film. The grainy quality that only real film can provide makes the movie look rough, yet beautiful. The psychological thriller elements, specifically the way in which we see Nina’s mind deteriorate is not entirely unique, but are sufficiently unnerving and suspenseful. The music also serves to drive the story. The classical music utilized in the film further creates the feeling that the entire film is itself a ballet. The film’s incredible performances are only magnified by the beautiful images and classical score.

On the surface, the film is a very good psychological thriller but its universal themes are what propel Black Swan to greatness. As the ballet Swan Lake shows through into Nina’s life, it comments upon her state of mind. The movie takes on an interesting dimension as Swan Lake not only serves as an allegory for Nina’s journey but the film itself is also an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. The film explores questions of reality and identity through a fantastical premise. The difficulty is in externalizing the psychological issues that are at the heart of the story, but the film has no trouble in doing so. The film is entertaining as a thriller but also is stimulating intellectually. The main themes of the movie are identity and reality, both of which are dealt with masterfully.

Mirrors play a vital role throughout the movie – from the makeup mirrors backstage, to the huge walls of mirrors in the studio, to Nina’s bathroom mirror – the film is littered with mirrors. This points to ultimate question of identity that Nina must face. She sees herself reflected so much, as she tries be one person, but who is she really? The doubles that she sees following her also point to her deteriorating mental state. Her feeling of being fragmented is represented to the audience not as unrealistic dialogue but as exciting, suspenseful imagery. This intellectual backbone of the film makes the otherwise ordinary thriller tropes present in the movie into something much more meaningful and interesting.

In the film, the line between reality and fantasy is intentionally blurred, and eventually disappears altogether. At first, one constantly tries to figure out what is real and what is not, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Instead of giving an easy answer, the movie disregards the distinction between real and non-real. What “really happened” doesn’t matter. The film portrays both sides of the story – the literal and the figurative – and the two are blended perfectly. Because there is no “answer”, many viewers will be put off by the film, but by leaving it open you are forced to actively engage with the movie rather than just sit back and relax.

Black Swan is a movie that hits you hard. It is visceral, exciting, suspenseful, beautiful, and thought-provoking. Go in with an open mind and you will be in for a wonderful film rife with beautiful images, extraordinary acting, and plenty to think about well after you leave the theater.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

  Forget the misleading trailers that suggest we have another ‘Species’ on our hands. Vincenzo Natali’s new thriller Splice has more in common with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or the body horror of David Cronenberg. Instead of a throwback monster movie or a tautly wound science fiction thriller, Splice delves into a morally chilling, psychologically twisted tale of two scientists and their conflicted relationship with their creation; a biologically morphing animal called Dren that starts life as a phallic baby and quickly evolves into French hottie  Delphine Chanéac.

Despite early promise, and a relatively strong cast and haunting visual effects, Splice quickly derails, delivering a limp and ineffective final third. Like the monster at the heart of it, this Splice is a mixed up menace that chatters away but can’t muster much of its own humanity.

Things start out well enough. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play a pair of scientists who not only share a common scientific goal, but also a bed. Clive (Brody) and Elsa (Polley) are looking for a way to replicate proteins in order to create medical drugs for use with cattle, and in their quest they bring to life ‘Fred’ and Ginger’, two animals that most closely resemble chicken mcnuggets by way of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. As the project is threatened, Elsa foolishly mixes some of her own DNA into the already successful creature cocktail and the resulting product is an animal more agile, intelligent and scientifically compelling than the original prototypes.

With a strained personal relationship between them (it’s hinted that Elsa had a difficult childhood and doesn’t want children) , Elsa and Clive become a kind of surrogate parents to their rapidly growing ‘child’, who leaps and climbs around the lab and pushes scrabble tiles around in an attempt to communicate. When it begins racing through a cruel parody of human development, Elsa and Clive move their operation to the a country farmhouse; it is revealed this was Elsa’s childhood home. The very alien Dren (it’s nerd spelled backwards, which is the acronym of the company Elsa and Clive work for) keeps developing until it’s no longer just cgi, but Delphine Chaneac. a French actress whose haunting soulful eyes have been augmented by speciall effects so they sit at far opposite sides of one another. Bald, winged and potentially carrying the capability to change gender, Dren doesn’t appear mentally or emotionally capable to completely understand her/its situation.

She isn’t a sexy seductress like Syl from the Species films, and certainly not the tortured, questioning creation from Frankenstein. For the purposes of the film, Natali keeps Dren essentially an animal. Yes, she’s an animal with a healthy curiosity and the ability to replicate and mime human behavior, but the film keeps reminding us both visually and thematically that she is far from human. With a pair of wings, a barbed and deadly tail, and legs that would make the aliens from The Arrival jealous, Dren is a creepy and disturbing chimera. At first, the film relegates her to the role of an out-and-out mutant, and for a time that works. When she’s finally being played by Delphine, there’s an attempt to give a dark allure and mine the film for sexual unease. It’s here that Splice unravels.

As I mentioned before, this isn’t a monster movie in the sense that the creature takes center stage. Natali seems so afraid of having the movie been seen as such, that he shrinks Dren and her role in the movie to a catalyst for the emotional unveiling of Elsa and Clive’s own interior natures. Splice wants to be a dark and disturbing cerebral exploration of how each of us categorize and understand our concept of humanity, and how we sometimes impose our notions of morality and intelligence on scenarios where doing so might be dangerous or negligent. Dren is made to be a sympathetic innocent initially, and watching Polley exploit her, despite the fact they share DNA, is difficult to watch. Later, when Clive actually gets physically intimate with Dren, presumably because he’s reacting to those flashes of Elsa he sees, the film collapses like a poorly made house of cards.

The reason for this is that Natali fails to connect all of the dots, and his ambition for the picture is of a higher caliber than the actual writing. There are plot threads that go nowhere, and at first Clive and Elsa are written like the usual devil-may-care edgy scientists in  a horror movie. That would be fine, except Splice wants us to relate and empathize with them, and despite fine performances from Brody and Polley (it’s not her fault Elsa is so implausibly written) it never fleshes them out at the start and then makes them so wholly unsympathetic due to their relationships with Dren. Elsa’s unexplained childhood, Dren’s mysterious nature, and no plausible explanation for why Brody would bang the experiment aren’t just minor plot holes, they are also thematic minefields.

Instead of recovering and drawing the pieces together, Splice becomes the very thing it’s trying to avoid in the final section; a big, goofy creature feature. There are chases, special effects, people screaming in the dark waving flashlights, and tragic comeuppance for the whole trio. All of it ends with one of the more daffy and inexplicable endings I’ve seen in awhile.

As I mentioned early on, Splice feels like it wants to be Cronenberg, but I believe Natali is too literal minded to make his film work in the same way the Canadian director brings together his strange odes to body horror. Cronenberg dives into the dark current of human subconscious and desire, and he can bring frightening metaphors about man’s relationship to himself and his society to life without needing them to reflect pure reality. It explains why we can watch something as bizarre as Videodrome and not question or balk at every odd thing that happens. Here, though, Natali doesn’t get beyond the surface leve of events. We aren’t seeing a grand and elegant allusion to the destruction and conquest of the natural world through science when Brody decides to get it on with Dren. No, we are watching an unpleasant and repellent scene of a man committing bestiality.

The difference is an important, one and despite its best efforts to do so, Splice is nowhere near as sophisticated enough to carry the   burden it sets up for itself. Like the alien curiosity at its heart, this is one weird mix and mash that, in the end, never should have been.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

I have been stoked for the release of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio’s most recent collaboration, Shutter Island, since back in October when I saw the trailer before Paranormal Activity.

While I’m a huge Leo fan and am partial to pretty much anything with him in it, the fact that Shutter Island has Scorsese and DiCaprio working together pretty much guarantees it will be a good flick. The two had success together with both The Aviator and The Departed, so I’m expecting good things from the duo again.

With the film’s release fast-approaching, my excitement has been spurred even more by seeing the trailers on TV, and now with the release of a behind-the-scenes featurette for Shutter Island.

Scorsese and DiCaprio have both frequently discussed how much they enjoy working with each other, and in the exclusive featurette about Shutter Island, the respect the actors have for Scorsese is evident. The video, while short, gives a little insight into how Scorsese goes about approaching scenes, and how the actors feel connected to their scenes due to Scorsese’s own connection to the film.

Check out the featurette below:

The suspense thriller Shutter Island follows two U.S. Marshals who go to investigate the disappearance of a woman from a mental hospital for the criminally insane. While there, Teddy Daniels, played by DiCaprio, comes to believe he has stumbled upon a twisted plot by the hospital’s doctors, which results in him doubting everything from his memory to his sanity.

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clark, and Max von Sydow star alongside DiCaprio. Shutter Island hits theaters February 19th.

Daniel Craig is stepping off of the Broadway stage and heading back to the big screen–but not just in the role of James Bond.

Craig is moving from Pinewood Shepperton’s studio in Britain, where the James Bond films are shot, to the company’s Toronto location to star in Jim Sheridan’s psychological thriller Dream House.

In the film, Craig will be playing the role of a man whose family moves to a small town, only to find out they’ve moved into a house that’s being haunted by its previous inhabitants.

Although the Morgan Creek production is being shot at Pinewood Shepperton’s Toronto studio, the parent company in Britain will earn fees based on the revenue performance of the Toronto studios.

Dream House is scheduled to be shot from January 25th to April 9th, 2010.

Milla Jovovich is on a hot streak right now. Soon to be seen in theaters in the alien thriller The Fourth Kind, currently filming the next Resident Evil movie, and already signed on for 2010′s Stone, Jovovich has one more project to add to her list.

Jovovich has been cast to star in Forecast Pictures, Radar Films and Minds Eye Entertainment’s psychological thriller Faces in the Crowd.

Faces in the Crowd, written by writer-director Julien Magnat, follows a woman who survives being attacked by a serial killer, but suffers a head injury that leaves her unable to recognize faces. While dealing with this, the woman also has to keep dodging her would-be killer, who plans to get rid of his one witness.

Faces will be Magnat’s first directorial experience in English, and will be produced by Stomp the Yard director Sylvain White and Where the Wild Things Are producer Scott Mednick.

Filming for Faces in the Crowd is to begin in March.

We have 3 “Righteous Kill” clips for you Al Pacino and Robert De Niro fans out there. I have heard nothing but good from sources about this film and look forward to seeing it myself.

Academy Award® winners Robert De Niro (Raging Bull) and Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman) star as a pair of veteran New York City police detectives on the trail of a vigilante serial killer in the adrenaline fueled psychological thriller Righteous Kill, directed by Jon Avnet (Red Corner, Fried Green Tomatoes) and written by Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man). The cast also features hip-hop superstar Curtis Jackson (Get Rich or Die Tryin).

After 30 years as partners in the pressure cooker environment of the NYPD, highly decorated Detectives David Fisk and Thomas Cowan should be ready for retirement, but arent. Before they can hang up their badges, they are called in to investigate the murder of a notorious pimp, which appears to have ties to a case they solved years before.

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“Righteous Kill” opens in theaters September 12th 08.