Former Balanchine star Toni Bentley: “[It] isn’t a film about real ballerinas at all, no more than Jurassic Park is a film about real scientists (or real dinosaurs for that matter) – it merely exploits the locale, the props, and the outerwear. … Aronofsky has created a movie celebrating the failure of a ballerina, and by implication her entire art – disguised, insidiously, as a film about sacrifice and success.”