Requiem for a Dream

"Aronofsky is so compelling, so visionary a filmmaker, he keeps us riveted to his film as tightly as Sara is to her TV set."

"A phantasmagoria of self-destructive obsession that is so visually astounding it becomes its own saving grace."

"In Requiem for a Dream, there’s nothing going on but style, and ultimately, that just isn’t enough."

"One of those rare films to fail because of a surfeit of ideas, rather than the opposite."

"There are two things though that lift this movie above the norm: one is the staggering performances from all the players... and the other is the flamboyant and innovative visual style of director Darren Aronofsky..."

"No one interested in the power and magic of movies should miss it."

"It's an almost unbearably bleak view and its lack of any obvious redemptive moral message will revolt some."

"Aronofsky draws astonishing performances from his actors."

"Unfortunately... it plummets in an inexorable, almost mechanical spiral."

"A powerful fable about love and addiction that manages to be darkly humorous when it isn't graphic or harrowing in the extreme."

"Can a movie be banal and highly original at the same time? If so, that movie is Requiem for a Dream."

"Aronofsky brings a new urgency to the drug movie by trying to reproduce, through his subjective camera, how his characters feel, or want to feel, or fear to feel."

"It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort."

"Merely uses innovative means to tell a trite story."

"(A) graphically depressing, downward spiral to hell."