- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
Jan 6, 2011100Just like the final performance by its deeply disturbed heroine, Black Swan is perfect.
-
100Artful, epic, operatic even, this thriller set in the world of ballet challenges the viewer with its intelligence and depth and wit.
-
100This eye-popping, inspired and often-demented (in a good way) cross between "The Red Shoes" and "All About Eve" channels horror maestros David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma and Dario Argento.
-
100One of the best movies of the year.
-
100To induce a state of dread and mesmerize with beauty is a rare, paradoxical achievement.
-
100Wild and woolly, the movie is a breathtaking head trip that hails from a long tradition of backstage melodramas: "42nd Street," "A Star Is Born," "All About Eve," and, yes, that kitschy '90s relic, "Showgirls."
-
100This is, no doubt about it, a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director's ambitions.
-
100Black Swan is visceral and real even while it's one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.
-
91Whether your tastes are delicate or coarse, whether you prefer the ballet or horror movies, there is plenty in the film for you.
-
91A florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame.
-
90It's all or nothing with Black Swan. Either you embrace its headlong descent into madness brought on by the pressures of artistic perfection, compounded by smothering anxiety, or you reject it. It's that simple.
-
Dec 6, 201090A wicked, sexy and ultimately devastating study of a young dancer's all-consuming ambition, Black Swan serves as a fascinating complement to Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," trading the grungy world of a broken-down fighter for the more upscale but no less brutal sphere of professional ballet.
-
89This drama-horror hybrid, set within a New York ballet company, strikes a tone more along the lines of the terrifying hallucinatories of Aronofsky's breakout film, "Requiem for a Dream," revisiting, too, favorite themes of monster mommies and female hysteria.
-
88Black Swan is ridiculously over the top, but in a way that makes it fascinating to watch.
-
88A near-masterpiece of a film set in the hothouse world of New York ballet.
-
88Portman's portrait of an artist under siege is unmissable and unforgettable. So is the movie. You won't know what hit you.
-
88The look and feel of Black Swan, which captures the essence of a major New York ballet production, is one of Aronofsky's great successes.
-
88A full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic.
-
88Is Black Swan high-minded? I'm happy to say: No. It is extremely high-grade hokum, which is to say it offers several different and combustible varieties.
-
83Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.
-
Jan 17, 201180An extraordinary, intoxicating movie. Its hard, twisted edges may turn off some, but there's no faulting either Aronofsky's technical mastery or Portman's flawless performance.
-
80Both a baroque thriller set in New York's ballet demimonde and a portrait of artistry as schizoid perfectionism, Darren Aronofsky's new film percolates parallel lines of fine madness-but then, doubling down on duality is this movie's raison d'etre.
-
80A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp-at the very least, it's the most risible and riotous backstage movie since "Showgirls."
-
80Aronofsky isn't loose enough, or canny enough, to be in touch with its camp soul.
-
80A psychosexual thriller that lures its viewers into a woozy nightmare.
-
80With Natalie Portman dominating the action and exhibiting a screen maturity not seen from her before, this all-stops-out Grand Guignol melodrama exhibits more than enough blood, sweat and tears (emphasis on the blood) to score nicely beyond the ballet crowd.
-
75Arriving with a savage grace, director Darren Aronofsky's nightmare-come-to-life Black Swan cements his reputation not only as one of the more daring filmmakers of his generation, but also as an actor's director of the first order.
-
75Like all his (Aronofsky) films, it's lurid, visually stimulating, thoughtful, absurd in spots, well-cast and unrelentingly intense.
-
75Black Swan is a stage door melodrama putting new spins on cliches as old as "All About Eve" (and maybe Adam). Setting them among ballerinas as opposed to showgirls or movie stars doesn't make them any less familiar.
-
75It's excessive and psychologically imprecise, coarse where it should be refined and too much like a David Cronenberg horror movie in places where restraint and intellectual rigor are called for.
-
75Audaciously whacked-out and never less than entertaining, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan mixes a backstage dance drama with a Freudian psychological thriller that's indebted to Roman Polanski's studies of shattered feminine psyches and David Cronenberg's movies about repressed bodies in rebellion.
-
75Some girls fight over men. Ballerinas fight over parts. But the occasional brilliance of Black Swan is that it's a one-way fight. Nina battles herself.
-
70Aronofsky blurs the line between reality and fantasy, turning the film into a gothic horror show that is fascinating and disappointing in equal measure. What's resplendently real, though, is the beauty of Ms. Portman's performance. She makes the whole lurid tale worthwhile.
-
70The black/white duality isn't terribly interesting, but as in most of Aronofsky's films, an intense horror of the body and its uncontrollability fuels the rhapsodic psychodrama.
-
65For all its dazzling allure, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, a feverishly psycho thriller set in the hermetic world of classical ballet, proves a meaningless exercise in Grand Guignol exhibitionism.
-
60Me, I'm of two minds about a movie that wants to be a nail-ripping thriller and a statement on an artist's unholy communion with her role. It's reminiscent of older, better movies.
-
50Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.
-
50This exercise in hysteria is so over the top that you don't know whether to scream or laugh. Despite an emotionally gripping performance by Natalie Portman, it's nothing more than a lavishly staged "Repulsion" in toe shoes.
-
42A love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.
-
40Indeed, White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.
-
40Off the dance floor, however, Black Swan is trashy and incoherent. Aronofsky, for all his gifts, is a gaudy maestro, opportunistic and insecure as an artist.
-
30Not just any kind of trash, it's high-art trash, a kind of "When Tutu Goes Psycho" that so prizes hysteria over sanity that it's worth your life to tell when its characters are hallucinating and when they're not.