The Black Swan

Where to begin? This movie captivated me at first. I fell hard for its cinema verite quality, the incandescent and often searing performance of Natalie Portman, and, yes, the handheld camera following the action.
But somewhere between the lesbian sex and the shard stabbing, I began to notice that I was watching a movie. I began to see the puppet strings: the chocolate pudding blood, the costume bait and switch, the makeup masquerading as madness.
In the end, I couldn't make the leap with Aronofsky. He lost me somewhere on the way, and I think it was when he began hoisting me over the incongruities as if I would not notice they were there.
It seemed that he wanted to remake "The Red Shoes" without the poetry, the beauty or the pathos. It's a "Red Shoes" for the modern world--raw, ugly, and doomed. Portman's performance alone redeems this film and saves it from being a parody of mental anguish and thwarted desire.