I'm in the minority on this one, but I just hated this movie. It's an insult to two great art forms: movies and ballet.

The film starts out fine. Natalie Portman is a young ballerina who's desperate to be perfect. She's smothered by her mom, Barbara Hershey, whose own dance career was cut short by motherhood, and she never lets her daughter forget it. Portman is also simultaneously taunted and hit on by the head of the ballet company, Vincent Cassel, who mocks her dancing and her sexual inexperience at every turn. Then she's led by fellow dancer Mila Kunis to either freedom or depravity, depending on
the scene.

Portman amazingly transforms herself into a darn good baby ballerina, and her descent into madness is beautifully tragic. But director Darren Aronofsky ("The Wrestler") does her no favors. What begins as a realistic drama about a fragile young woman becomes part slasher flick and part "Striptease"-esque sexual exploitation. And then it gets even worse, moving into camp, with Winona Ryder playing a dancer who's so upset about being aged out of the profession that she steps in front of a moving car. (That'll show 'em.) And, of course, we have to have various scenes of bitchy ballerinas being selfish, cruel and abusive. The flick eventually becomes an incoherent, melodramatic mess. It's completely unclear what's really happening and what's in Portman's unwell mind and that, to me, is a dirty trick on the audience, like watching a murder mystery and not being given all the clues to solve it yourself. It's a cheat.

In "The Wrestler," Aronofsky respected his characters and their profession, but I think his lack of caring for these characters is just plain wrong. If you're looking for something akin to "The Turning Point," look elsewhere.