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Having recently endured starvation and battered toes in the service of her art, Natalie Portman now encounters another of the ordeals laid out for ambitious young actresses who want to be movie stars. Less than a week after gracing the Golden Globes broadcast in a rose-bedecked gown and collecting an award for her work in “Black Swan,” Ms. Portman pops up on Friday on the big screen in a pre-Valentine's Day romantic comedy with an instantly forgettable title.

Let me check my notes. The name of this one is “No Strings Attached,” and it also stars Ashton Kutcher, a perfectly nice-looking fellow and an old hand at this kind of thing. His character, a television writer named Adam, is described as “sooo tall” and “almost annoyingly happy,” which pretty much captures Mr. Kutcher's salient traits.

Ms. Portman, playing Emma, a Los Angeles doctor who works emergency room rotations, is quite a bit smaller and more emotionally complicated. What are these two doing together? A possible solution to the mystery emerges if you recall a particular scene involving Mila Kunis in “Black Swan.” Ms. Read more