Movie Review: Black Swan (2010)

by Tony Dayoub

I have never been one attracted to Natalie Portman much past her obvious physical beauty. With the exception of early turns in The Professional (aka Léon) and Beautiful Girls, her performance style has always struck me as perfect to the point of being brittle. So Darren Aronofsky's use of her in Black Swan stands out as an astute bit of exploitation, mining Portman's own flaws to inform her role as an overambitious ballerina. Indeed, one could apply this to the entire ensemble cast of this thriller mashing up the ballet movie with the psychological horror film.

Blu-ray Review: The Red Shoes (1948)

by Tony Dayoub

I've always gravitated to escapist cinema, whether the genre is horror, science fiction, the surreal, the western, or in this case, the musical. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes is definitely the ultimate movie about dance, ballet in particular. But as David Ehrenstein points out at the start of a brilliant essay included in Criterion's upcoming Blu-ray reissue of the film:

It is a kind of musical, a mainstream favorite, as well as a Technicolor spectacular. But musical generally comes as a hyphenate with comedy attached to it. The Red Shoes is drama.

It precedes the colorful MGM spectacles so prevalent throughout the fifties, directly inspiring An American in Paris (1951) for one. However, it is the psychodrama at the root of this fairy tale adaptation which gives the film its weight, both visually and subtextually.