2011 Oscars: Best Picture Be the first to comment 26 January 2011
The nominations for Best Picture at the 2011 Academy Awards are in. Check out the Time Out mini-reviews of each film and tell us who you think will win.
Black Swan
It’s best to switch off the more sensible side of your mind, along
with any idea that you’re going to experience a documentary-style
portrait of the world of ballet, before encountering Darren
Aronofsky’s Black Swan. It’s a film that really only works if you let
yourself be swirled up, like its main character, in a storm of
hysteria, paranoia and tears: it’s too impulsive and emotional to be
picked apart at the level of logic and too ludicrous to exist in a
world other than its own. It’s huge fun, but only if you’re willing to
swallow its more bonkers excesses. ‘Black Swan’ gives us a harried,
weepy Natalie Portman as Nina, a delicate, overly mothered dancer with
the New York City Ballet who cracks up ten times over when she lands
the dual roles of the White and Black Swans, Odette and Odile, in a
production of Swan Lake. Realism barely gets a look in as Aronofsky
and his team go hell-for-leather in reflecting this young woman’s
fractured mental state – and the ballet’s own story and themes – in
everything from an invasive, swirling photographic style to the
monochrome production.
