"Ballet is an art which explores love and death through the symbolism of music and dance. Mix in a ballerina with extreme self esteem issues, and you get a fascinating, edgy film. "Black Swan" really has the stylized, frenetic look and feel of Roman Polanski’s "The Tenant", in particular. Like "The Tenant", "Black Swan" digs under one’s skin in creepy ways." Steve Crum VIDEO REVIEW MASTER "Like all his films, it's lurid, visually stimulating, thoughtful, absurd in spots, well-cast and unrelentingly intense. Portman handles every change with extraordinary skill. She can be timid or confident, innocent or sexually knowing, pathetic or enraged. Portman’s Nina is like a flawed diamond cracking under unbelievable pressure, and they provide the perfect setting for this jewel." Lawrence Toppman CHARLOTTE OBSERVER "Not only does Portman look like a ballerina, she can dance and the ballet scenes are beautifully shot, with the focus always on Nina’s internal conflict. Rebellion, jealousy, paranoia and obsession are the themes and Aronofsky dares to explore the flip side of beauty, with all its ugly consequences." Louise Keller URBAN CINEFILE "This is Portman's film all the way. She exhibits an intensity and a tightly-wound energy that turns Nina into a ticking bomb. Director Darren Aronofsky is known for his surreal films such as “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream.” Here he does several things to make the film seem almost dreamlike, using techniques more familiar in thrillers and horror films than in a story of ballet. " Daniel M. Kimmel NEW ENGLAND MOVIES WEEKLY "Natalie Portman may not be exactly a spring chicken, but the beautiful performer is throttled, plucked and skewered in this elegant and grotesque tour de force. Directed with utter confidence by cinema sadist Darren Aronofsky, "Black Swan" is a dark fairy tale. Worthy of Oscar talk." COMMERCIAL APPEAL

"Wonderfully delirious, lurid filmmaking: a tour de force. There is a dark stream of masochism flowing through this film, and this is a theme which also marked Aronofsky's much lauded "PI". The special effects are well handled, to take us into someone's mind, not to create a fantasy world for us to escape to. When Nina finally dances the black swan, we share her savage triumph." Julie Rigg ABC MOVIE TIME "I love this movie to death! To pinch myself to see if I was dreaming, I attended a second showing during the 2010 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. The performances are expertly pitched to melodrama. Miss Portman commands with such bravado that it will be the performance to beat in the coming awards season. Mila Kunis is raw, gorgeous and sexy as all get out." Greg Klymkiw ELECTRIC SHEEP "Darren Aronofsky is as dark and quirky as ever, while Natalie Portman shines under his direction. Portman is amazing as Nina. Kunis is also effective as Lily. Both Ryder and Hershey are good in their roles. “Black Swan” is not a movie for all audiences. It is a thriller played out with much intensity." JACKIE K COOPER "With Portman's dance moves as convincing as her descent into derangement and Kunis also hitting a career high as her minxy opposite, here's a trip to the ballet that won't fail to sort the men from the boys. "Nobody could accuse Black Swan of not sticking its creative neck out." Elliott Noble SKY MOVIES "Simultaneously one of the most emotionally devastating experiences I have had in a theatre yet I could not look away. Aronofsky, who also directed Mickey Rourke's Oscar-Nominated performance in "The Wrestler", is back with one of the sickest, yet beautiful films you will see all year." Kevin McCarthy BDK REVIEWS

The Inside Story The daring and original director Darren Aronofsky lures audiences into a haunting, fractured world of delusions, doubles and paranoia in "Black Swan", his first psychological thriller. He spins a sensual and chilling tale of a prima ballerina locked in an obsessive battle with dark impulses that slowly engulf her. Academy Award® nominee Natalie Portman ("Closer") stars as Nina, an ambitious young New York ballet dancer who is after the ultimate double role: the delicately innocent White Swan and the seductively evil Black Swan of the star-making classic "Swan Lake". She gets the role but is unsure if she can let go enough to embody the dark side of the Swan Queen. As she ascends to new heights with her body, her most deeply buried fantasies, jealousies and nightmares begin to ensnare her mind into the blackest depths causing a dangerous clash with the provocative newcomer who is her greatest rival. Nina quickly becomes all too perfectly entwined with the bewitching and deadly Black Swan. Far from the typical thriller set in a world of crime or haunted houses, Aronofsky’s vividly intimate portrait of a woman unraveling at the very seams of her psyche takes place in the least expected of realms, the artistically electric and physically demanding world of professional ballet. For Aronofsky, it was the perfect place to unfold a visually explosive tale of the obsessive pressure to be perfect. As with the acclaimed "The Wrestler", this film also gave him a chance to plunge into an unseen world and peel back what makes the people who are driven to sacrifice so much. Although he started thinking about this story fifteen years ago, Aronofsky ("Reqiem For A Dream") notes that "Black Swan" is intentionally a companion piece to his most recent film, "The Wrestler". While wrestling and ballet might seem like they couldn’t possibly be more disparate worlds, "Black Swan" dips into moments of sheer psychological horror unlike anything Aronofsky has done before. The two films are tied together by themes of bodily extremes, souls in turmoil and by a filmmaking style that pulls the audience inside the characters’ fascinating inner worlds. "Some people call wrestling the lowest of art forms, and some call ballet the highest of art forms, yet there is something elementally the same. Mickey Rourke as a wrestler was going through something very similar to Natalie Portman as a ballerina. They’re both artists who use their bodies to express themselves and they’re both threatened by physical injury, because their bodies are the only tool they have for expression. What was interesting for me was to find these two connected stories in what might appear to be unconnected worlds." It's no coincedence that both films are also tied by a lead performance that dives well beneath the surface, says Aronofsky, who compares Portman’s commitment to that of Rourke. "The role of Nina is quite different from anything Natalie has done before, and she took it to another level. Playing Nina was as much an athletic feat as a feat of acting." As secretive as the world of professional wrestling can be, Aronofsky found the ballet world even more insular and closed-off to outsiders. And then there was the training that Portman had to undertake in order to make the film’s ballet scenes as incandescently lyrical as they are full of mounting tension and foreboding. "Ballet is something most people start training for when they’re four or five years old and as they live it, it changes their bodies, it transforms them. To have an actress who hasn’t gone through all of that convincingly play a professional ballet dancer is the tallest of orders. Yet somehow, with her incredible will and discipline, Natalie became a dancer. Even the most serious dancers were impressed. I’m convinced that the physical work also connected her to the emotional work." 1999 and 2009 Independent Spirit Award winner Aronofsky ("Pi" & "The Wrestler") notes that he was gratified to find a cast who could take on this challenge. They, in turn, were attracted by a story that became a suspenseful, yet daring, odyssey into a dancer’s sudden rise and terrifying descent. The idea behind "Black Swan" came after the director saw a dark drama by Andrés Heinz ("The Understudy") which featured a perilous rivalry between an actress and her mysterious understudy. While growing up Aronofsky had witnessed his sister Patti's shockingly tough training as a ballet dancer at the High School of Performing Arts in New York City. "My sister was a dancer growing up and she was very into ballet. It wasn't really anything that I understood. But as I got older, I was thinking about worlds to set films in and I thought ballet could be an interesting world to explore. In addition, I was very interested in Dostoevsky's "The Double", which is a story about a guy who wakes up and his double is there, and the double starts to replace his life. Then I went to see a production of Swan Lake, which I thought was just a bunch of girls in tutus. I didn't know what it was. But when I saw that there was a Black Swan and a White Swan, played by one dancer, and it was kind of a Eureka moment." It would lead to the creation of Nina and Lily, two highly competitive rising dance stars willing to sacrifice anything and everything for that one perfect performance. It was Aronofsky’s idea to merge Heinz’s original concept with the story behind the world’s most popular ballet, "Swan Lake", which tells the story of a dramatic duel between innocence and wickedness. All the while, he was also working with Heyman to create the macabre new twist which galvanized the tale. In the final draft, the key elements of "Swan Lake": swans, demons, spells and doubles; became entwined with Nina’s psyche as it shatters into a psychosexual kaleidoscope of shards, turning her from a naïve young girl into a dangerous, metamorphosed creature. "Darren and I had talked for years about doing a ballet thriller," Heyman recalls. "What I did was to take the initial drafts of the screenplay and adapt the plot of "Swan Lake" right into the centre of it. That changed everything and became the jumping off point for a modern New York story about duality, about doubles and about the fear of someone or something taking over your life." As the final script became a world unto itself, Heyman says it was increasingly difficult to place it into a genre. Was the story a plunge into biological horror as a woman morphs into a demon swan or a riveting portrait of a driven artist losing control of her mind under extreme pressure? Heyman hopes the answer is both things at once. "My favorite films are always difficult to categorize," says Heyman. "Our hope for "Black Swan" is that it would be one of those films. That it would scare people but also get under the skin in a lasting way." The project soon attracted a producing team that included Mike Medavoy ("Zodiac"), Arnold W Messer ("All the King's Men"), Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin ("Hounddog"). "This is both new ground and familiar territory for Darren. On the one hand, it is a departure for him into the psychological thriller element, which is something he’s never really attempted before and yet it evokes an intense realism with his attention to detail, camera style and the way he works with actors to get very real performances," says Franklin. Executive producer Jennifer Roth ("Smart People" & "World's Greatest Dad") believes the film, "is not simply a thriller nor a movie about dance. It encompasses all these different aspects and crosses over to a dark but fascinating place." Even before the screenplay for the film was completed, Darren Aronofsky knew who would play Nina Sayers, the hopeful solo dancer overtaken by unsettling fantasies and eerie events as she prepares for the greatest role of her life. It had to be Natalie Portman, whose diversity of memorable roles ranges from Queen Amidala in the "Star Wars" series to her Golden Globe® winning role as a stripper in Mike Nichol’s adaptation of "Closer". Not only had Portman studied ballet as a child, more importantly, she had the commitment and drive to plunge into the immense physical and psychological demands of a part that would have her leaping, spinning and losing touch with reality, all at the same time. Aronofsky approached her several years ago to talk about the film, then still in a fledgling state. "Very soon after I first started thinking of the idea for "Black Swan", I met with Natalie for coffee in Times Square. She had done a lot of ballet before she became an actress and had continued doing it over the years just to stay in shape. She told me straight away that one of the things she’d always wanted to do was play a dancer." Though it would take almost ten years after their meeting before the screenplay was finished, when Portman read it, she was riveted by Nina’s twisting psychological journey. Nina starts out as what the ballet world calls a 'bunhead', a not so endearing term for a ballerina so devoted to dance that nothing else matters, who is sheltered by her equally driven, former-dancer mother and who never really developed an adult life of her own. "Nina is dedicated, hardworking but also obsessive," Portman ("Garden State") explained. "She doesn’t yet have her own voice as a dancer, as a young woman, but she progressively changes as she searches to find her sensuality and sense of freedom. At the same time, she also starts to come undone, and that was the challenge." To play Nina's rival Lily, Aronofsky chose talented Mila Kunis, (born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine) a rapidly rising actress who, with roles in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "The Book Of Eli", brought the brashness and dark charm to her role as the overly ambitious newcomer. "Mila plays Lily as someone who has exactly what Nina wants. She is much freer, more alive and more sexual than Nina," says Aronofsky. "Lily has the freedom to express herself and that becomes the source of both great allure and intense friction for Nina." Kunis was instantly drawn to her wildly uninhibited character and to the intriguing idea of playing a dancer though the brutal reality knocked her for a serious loop. "I had this idea in the beginning of grandeur, of feeling graceful and wearing a tutu, but you have no idea how physically demanding it is until you do it," Kunis (Jackie Burkhart in "That '70's Show") says. "It really takes a toll on your body!" Nevertheless, she threw herself into training and into exploring the upending effects Lily has on fellow dancer, Nina. "The key to Lily is that she had to be exactly the opposite of Nina, her mirror opposite, in every way," the 2010 Venice Film Festival Marcello Mastroianni Award winning actress notes. "Even their dance styles are opposite. Nina is a very technical, beautiful dancer while Lily is more raw, free and spontaneous. Nina’s whole life is ballet but Lily eats hamburgers, parties, has sex, does drugs and explores everything. She’s the complete antithesis of Nina and embodies the Black Swan." The company’s brilliant choreographer and artistic director, Thomas Leroy, is played by Cesar-winning French actor Vincent Cassel. "I knew it would be dark but very sexy. Then, I discovered Mila and soon Winona Ryder got involved. So, honestly, how could I say no?" What It's All About

Nina, is a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life, like all those in her profession, is completely consumed with dance. She lives with her retired ballerina mother Erica who zealously supports her daughter’s professional ambition. When artistic director Thomas Leroy decides to replace prima ballerina Beth Macintyre for the opening production of their new season, "Swan Lake", Nina is his first choice. But, Nina has competition: a new dancer, Lily, who impresses Leroy as well. Swan Lake requires a dancer who can play both the White Swan with innocence and grace, and the Black Swan, who represents guile and sensuality. Nina fits the White Swan role perfectly but Lily is the personification of the Black Swan. As the two young dancers expand their rivalry into a some-what twisted friendship, Nina's dark side surfaces with a recklessness that threatens to completely destroy her.

The Verdict "Those who understand the difference between a nut and a bolt will benefit most from Darren Aronofsky's latest film, the critically acclaimed, "Black Swan". Missing this dark, exciting, psycho-thriller, because it features a storyline based on a Ballet Company, will, for those who profess to be 'lovers of good cinema', expose just how shallow and narrow their appreciation of good (in this case, excellent) cinema is. For those who believe ballet is only for snobs or the well to do I say, throw off the shackles that bind you, set your mind free and lose yourself in this visually and sensually stunning film, which deviates from what many of us would perceive as 'the norm', when it comes to ballet. Portman (who recently announced her engagement to "Black Swan" choreographer Benjamin Millepied), gives an Oscar® worthy performance in the lead role as the troubled Nina. She has come a long way since her feature film debut in "Leon: The Professional" (1994) which eventually led to her being cast as Queen Amidala in "Star Wars" Episodes I, II and III. Likewise Mila Kunis (whose acting career started at the age of nine) has too, come a long way. Probably best known to many for her TV role in "That '70's Show", she introduced herself to a world-wide audience in 2008, playing Rachel Jensen in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall". In the same year she appeared with Mark Wahlberg in "Max Payne" and later, in 2009, appeared in another film featuring Wahlberg: "Date Night". Catalyst for the rivalry between Nina and Lily (and the latters descent into hell), is the manipulative Thomas Leroy, played by 2008 Tokyo International Film Festival Best Actor Award winner, Vincent Cassel. Also making noteworthy contributions are EMMY, Golden Globe and 2008 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress winner Barbara Hershey as Nina's possessive mother Erica and, two time National Board of Review ("Mermaids" & "The Age of Innocence") and Golden Globe winner ("The Age of Innocence"), Winona Ryder. The films final act is, to state the bleeding obvious: most impressive. Highly recommended. 5 STARS." Who's Playing Who?

Natalie Portman Mila Kunis Vincent Cassel Barbara Hershey Winona Ryder Ksenia Solo Kristina Anapau Janet Montgomery Sebastian Stan Toby Hemingway Sergio Torrado

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Nina Lily Thomas Leroy Erica Beth Macintyre Veronica Galina Madeline Andrew Tom Sergio

The Crew

Director Screenplay From Producers Original Music Cinematography Film Editing Casting Production Design Art Direction Set Decoration Costume Design

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Darren Aronofsky Mark Heyman/Andres Heinz/John McLaughlin a story by Andres Heinz Scott Franklin/Mike Medavoy/Arnold Messer/Brian Oliver Clint Mansell Matthew Libatique Andrew Weisblum Mary Vernieu Thérèse DePrez David Stein Tora Peterson Amy Westcott

Run Time 108 minutes Rated MA15+ [AUST] Copyright ©2011 - Fox Searchlight Films - All Rights Reserved ©1999-2011 - The Movie Pages & Impact Internet Services - All Rights Reserved. Protected by Australian & International Copyright, Trademark Laws & Intellectual Property Rights.