Dana Stevens on Natalie Portman

Unfortunately, [the movie] also assumes that Natalie Portman is interesting enough to watch suffer for two hours. Here I come up against what I’m fully willing to admit may be a personal limitation … I’ve never believed her in a single role. She evokes no emotional response in me beyond, “Oh, there’s Natalie Portman.” She doesn’t overact or underact; she just stands around with whatever the appropriate expression for the scene seems to be on her sweet, pretty, childlike face. If there’s something going on behind that face, I neither know nor care what it is, which means that long stretches of Brothers involving her character’s interiority struck me as dramatically inert. If you possess the gene that enables Portman-caring, you may find them brilliant.