Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010). Black Swan, the negative image of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, is anchored by Portman's brilliant performance as a ballerina with a tenuous grip on reality. Director Aronofsky's abrasive visual scheme, full of jarring tonal shifts and disturbing imagery, offers unflinching insight into a fractured mind's inward gyre as it struggles to assume another identity and swirls in a sea of doubles, both real and imagined. And floating above all this is Clint Mansell's harrowing soundtrack, which itself is the double to Aronofsky's otherwise image-heavy film. The best American film of 2010. A-
The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke, 2009). In this blessedly unromanticized recreation of Europe on the precipice of WWI, a series of increasingly disturbing events slowly unravels an idealistic German village. But what begins as a tentative contrast—in equally unsympathetic terms—between the lives of menial laborers and the bourgeoisie quickly shifts into a contrast between the sordid reality below the surface and the artifices people construct to obscure it (thus continuing themes Haneke has also dealt with in previous films, most notably Caché). The villagers' religion—so successful at binding them psychologically—seems wholly incapable of binding the community socially or morally. The White Ribbon is filmed in beautiful black and white by Christian Berger, whose work here is the equal of Nykvist's work with Bergman. A
