Swan Lake director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel – Eastern Promises, Oceans 12) welcomes his production company for the upcoming season with the following little story.
“We all know the story. The virginal girl who is pure and sweet but trapped in the body of a swan. She desires freedom, but only true love can break the spell. Nearly granted is her wish in the form of a prince. But, before he can declare his love, the lustful twin, the Black Swan, tricks and seduces him. Devastated, the White Swan leaps off a cliff, killing herself and, in death, finds freedom”.
It’s short and simple, and we all understand it. And it’s the basis of Leroy’s ballet. As Thomas tells this story to his attentive company, he taps a few females on the shoulder. One of these women will replace an aging Beth (Winona Ryder – Edward Scissorhands, Girl, Interrupted) as the prima ballerina for the opening production of their new season, Swan Lake. Nina (Natalie Portman – The Other Boleyn Girl, Closer ) is one of the girls who is tapped and ultimately awarded the role.
Watching Mel Gibson as a loving father gone raging madman in Martin Campbell’s (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro) 2010 Edge of Darkness doesn’t seem as much a stretch of the imagination as it might have seemed a few years ago. In his first starring role since 2002’s Signs, Gibson plays Thomas Craven, a detective of the Boston Police Department and a single father of one. After Craven witnesses the killing of his 24-year-old daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic), murdered on the steps of his own by a drive-by shooter, he becomes obsessed with finding out who killed his daughter and, more importantly, why. This movie was a modest success both with critics and with audiences. Still, it made over $100 million less than the 2008 Liam Neeson movie Taken, which is similar in plot but delivers the goods and has you rooting for Neeson. This is more than you can say for Gibson’s character.
Long before he was turning heads and receiving Oscar nominations for dismantling bombs in Iraq (
There were two movies released in 2010 about a single individual trapped in a circumstance that most of us cannot even fathom, let alone endure. One of those was the Danny O’Boyle/James Franco Best Picture Academy Award nominee, 127 Hours. The other was a much lesser-known and slightly less well-received effort by first-time director Roberto Cortes and Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal, The Amityville Horror), called Buried. It’s hard to know how Buried would have done if it had been released in any other year. Unfortunately for Cortes and Reynolds, it was released just months before the true story of 
Although I had never heard of 2004’s The River King, the DVD case piqued my interest when I saw it in the under-$5 bin at Walmart one day. I purchased the movie, but it sat on my shelf for a couple of years before I picked it up again when looking for something to watch. The case has piqued my interest once again. The movie hooked me within its first five minutes. While this was not a great movie, it was worth watching. The opening scene’s setting—a dead body discovered beneath a transparent sheet of ice in a narrow, winding river, amid a desolate forest in the depths of winter—was perfectly captured by director Nick Willing.