Requiem for a Dream

At times disturbing and always intense, this flick offers its own acid trip for viewers and is a first-hand look at four people who become trapped by their own hell.

A staccato narrative parallels the experiences and hallucinations of a woman on drugs with those of her son and his friends.

A gut-wrenching, formally adventurous masterpiece or an ugly, flashy piece of empty-headed propaganda?

Burnished camerawork and ex-Pop Will Eat Itself head Mansell's part-punchy, part-elegiac score reinforce and counterpoint the increasingly nightmarish visuals.

With spareness and unremitting cruelty, Aronofsky shows his characters' accelerated slide to destruction. It's an almost unbearably bleak view and its lack of any obvious redemptive moral message will revolt some.

I think it’s a masterpiece&#59; gut-wrenching and soaked in a hellscape of realistic proportions. Requiem for a Dream is a tough watch, but an essential one.

If anything, Aronofsky’s doomy, freaky, humorless style defeats his own purpose: It re-animates the dark romance of dissolution.

Though all aspects of the film are excellent from story to cinematography to directing it is the acting which holds the whole thing together. The three leads are amazing.

While a whiff of symbolism softens the horror elements in Pi, no such escape is provided in Requiem for a Dream (2000)...