Hitchcock Movie Review

There is a speech delivered by Helen Mirren in Hitchcock that begins bluntly and forcefully, before becoming one of those acting moments that gets played over and over again at awards shows. It’s a moment of performance that can so quickly and easily become overwrought, but then you realize that Mirren is an actress of incredible skill, subtlety, and professionalism that she won’t let her performance overshadow her character. She plays Alma Reville, the great director Alfred Hitchcock’s long-suffering wife and behind-the-scenes collaborator. She holds the film together and although Hitchcock is ostensibly concerned with the making of Psycho, that’s really just a backdrop for the way their marriage functioned and occasionally faltered.

Black Swan Movie Review

Aronofsky uses mirrors to visually illustrate Nina's fractured mind.

Darren Aronofsky is not a director who does anything by halves. His films have an air of the lunatic about them and focus on the ways people mistreat and brutalize themselves both physically and emotionally (although one tends to follow the other). In Pi it was a mathematician descending into madness searching for a universal theorem. In Requiem for a Dream he chronicled the toll drugs (both illicit and prescribed) take on the human body. The Wrestler, his most straightforward narrative film to date, contained elements touching on the physical torment “professional” wrestlers put themselves through.