A ballet dancer wins the lead in "Swan Lake" and is perfect for the role of the delicate White Swan, Princess Odette, but slowly loses her mind as she strives to subsume, at the behest of the director, the personality of the Black Swan, Odile. Once again Aronovsky returns to his familiar themes of obsession and addiction (see also 'Requiem For A Dream', 'Pi' and 'The Wrestler') and has created an enigmatic and frustrating film. Audiences have been divided over the degree of success he achieve find out more...
An expressionistic look at the ballet world focusing on the rigid relationship between artist and teacher until a young composer brings the ballerina back to reality. Ground-breaking at the time in its use of colour and movement and made more intriguing by its real-life model of Nijinsky/Diaghilev.
find out more...Sometimes movies are built around a great idea begging for a story, in this case pairing ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov with tap great Gregory Hines. The resulting storm of dance in White Nights, as one would expect, is great, but the story is a little forced. Baryshnikov plays (in parallel to his own life) a Russian defector to the U.S. who ends up a prisoner in the motherland after his plane is forced to land in Leningrad during an emergency. Hines is an America find out more...