David Edelstein

In Darren Aronofsky's ballet thriller, a repressed ballerina must surrender to her sexuality to master Swan Lake's leading role. Critic David Edelstein says the dramatic film is a "camp classic -- like Showgirls remade by Roman Polanski."

Two gross-out movies open this weekend. Todd Phillips' buddy comedy Due Date and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, about a hiker, played by James Franco, who has to chop off his own arm after he's pinned under a boulder. David Edelstein says the two films are "relentlessly in your face."

The third installment of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy focuses once again on the corruption-fighting duo of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and cyber-avenger Lisbeth Salander. But as critic David Edelstein notes, an epic devotion to detail makes the movie seem like "an interminable footnote." (Note: Spoilers galore.)

Clint Eastwood's latest film is a supernatural drama about a factory worker with the ability to communicate with the dead. Critic David Edelstein says the film is too contrived to tell us anything enlightening about how to live in the shadow of death.

David Edelstein reviews two movies, Tamara Drewe and It's Kind of a Funny Story, that are both funny and discomfiting. Tamara a Thomas Hardy-inspired romantic comedy, "has the fullness of an 18th century novel," says Edelstein, who also applauds Zach Galifianakis' performance in Funny Story.

Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires painted an unflattering portrait of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. The film version gets the programmer-nerd details (and Harvard's oak-and-crimson ambiance) right -- but fails to see the upside of a worldwide social network.

Director Oliver Stone turned down several offers to make a sequel to his 1987 hit Wall Street, for which Michael Douglas won an Oscar as hostile-takeover king Gordon Gekko. Then the market collapsed and it seemed a good time to revisit his old antihero.

The documentary Catfish may not be on the up-and-up. But does it matter? David Edelstein says no. Catfish, he says, provides a "true sense of adventure" and conveys emotions that "run the gamut from anxiety to contempt to curiosity to compassion."

A couple of years back, the two-time Oscar nominee announced he was giving up acting to become a rapper. David Edelstein reviews Casey Affleck's film I'm Still Here, which tracks Phoenix's transformation -- and says there may be a real madness in Phoenix's method performance.

Anton Corbijn's paranoid thriller stars George Clooney as an anonymous international assassin constantly on the run. Critic David Edelstein says the spare movie "cast a spell" over the audience -- as they entered the mind of a man with no past or future.