Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

If Darren Aronofsky is the filmmaker equivalent of Brandon Flowers of The Killers, then Black Swan is his "When You Were Young," a terrific song (amidst some really horrible ones and a few that almost get it right) where all of the operatic pretension effortlessly rises and tugs you along, away from a well-deserved reservation and hesitance to the other side of the hump where intoxication and sadness reigns. The film is is essentially the collection of seconds born of awaking in the middle of the night, grabbing a baseball bat and slowly creaking down the hallway toward sounds you understand to be consistent with those of a home invasion—only stretched to two TMJ-inducing hours.

Aronofsky is not to be confused with a first-tier contemporary director on par with, say, Paul Thomas Anderson (there's a little too much "arteest" in Aronofsky's blood for my money) but he deserves a lot of credit here for keeping the train on the track; he has certainly matured since the similarly toned Requiem for a Dream, which I found pretty intolerable. But in the end, it's primarily due to Natalie Portman's disciplined, anxiety-drenched and transformative performance that Black Swan is deeply affecting, painfully sad and thrilling, miraculously avoiding the potential for silliness—there's plenty of it—lurking around in the screenplay. Given its fantastical leanings, I can certainly see why someone would find the whole thing to be utterly fucking ridiculous. Me, I was haunted, troubled, in admiration. It's black licorice, black olives; either you like it or you don't.