Review: Black Swan

The countless men who feel that being dragged to a ballet with their female companions is boring are in for a rude awakening when they see Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, an aggressively paced, twisted film that leaves your head spinning faster than a well-executed pirouette.

In the film, Natalie Portman plays Nina, a young and delicate ballerina tapped to dance the dual leads in Swan Lake. She has the innocence to play the White Swan but is encouraged to explore her dark side by her demanding director (Vincent Cassel). With an overzealous stage parent of a mother (Barbara Hershey) and a pretty and talented newcomer challenging her for the role (Mila Kunis), doing so is hardly difficult for Nina, who it is established early is far from mentally stable to begin with. As the ballet’s opening approaches, though, Nina’s mind is overtaken by the darkness and, like the character she represents, she is overtaken by the Black Swan. READ MORE

Review: The Green Hornet

In the action comedy The Green Hornet, Seth Rogen takes the word “antihero” to a new level; in fact, his character is so far from heroic that he relies on his mechanic sidekick to trick out his car and do the majority of the fighting.

Rogen is Britt Reid, a playboy newspaper heir who is more comfortable as a subject of gossip articles than the editor of news columns. But when his father dies and his mourning finds him hanging out in bad parts of the city, Reid rises from the depth of disinterest to try to infiltrate and eliminate the city’s crime syndicate. He teams with his father’s mechanic Kato (John Chou), a karate and weapons expert, to back him up. READ MORE

Review: True Grit

I can’t put my finger on what exactly drew me to True Grit. I have not seen the original, revered film by the same name and starring my late grandfather’s favorite actor, I don’t hold a candle for the Coen brother’s films other than Fargo and The Hudsucker Proxy, and I’m not particularly fond of westerns. Nevertheless, I felt a great urgency to see this movie, and my instincts proved me right. READ MORE

Review: The Social Network

It seems odd that the subject of Facebook – a website that people use to simplify their lives and a substitute for spoken communication – would be embraced by a director as complicated as David Fincher and a writer as verbose as Aaron Sorkin. But make no mistake, you users of Farmville and Superpoke: The Social Network is far more than a thoughtless romp through the site’s growth from a few hundred to a few hundred million users. Instead, it’s a wickedly smart, bitingly funny look at how a social pariah created the most social website on the web, and it’s without question one of the best films of the year. READ MORE

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Dating is hard. You have to deal with the awkward “getting to know you” moments, the missteps in judgements because you haven’t completed the “getting to know you moments,” and the anxiety that you’re not doing enough to impress your new love interest. If you successfully navigate the early-relationship waters, you still have to worry whether you measure up to all the boyfriends that have come before you. Imagine if you had to do all that…and said exes started attacking you in gamer-style fights. Such is the life of the titular hero in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which, while not necessarily one of the best movies of the summer, is without a doubt one of the most entertaining. READ MORE