Aronofsky rewrites the language of film to create a dizzying journey into the abyss. The best film of 2000.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
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Reviews Counted:123
Fresh:98
Rotten:25
Average Rating:7.3/10
Consensus: Though the movie may be too intense for some to stomach, the wonderful performances and the bleak imagery are hard to forget.
Theatrical Release:Oct 6, 2000 Limited
Box Office: $2,546,851
Synopsis: For his follow-up to his darkly brilliant debut, PI, director Darren Aronofsky chose to adapt a tough and meaty piece of work: Hubert Selby's 1968 novel REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, a dark spiral into the... For his follow-up to his darkly brilliant debut, PI, director Darren Aronofsky chose to adapt a tough and meaty piece of work: Hubert Selby's 1968 novel REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, a dark spiral into the abyss of barren fantasies doomed to extinction. However, in Aronofsky's frenetic, visionary, unique, and disturbing style lies the perfect setting for this story of four people whose intertwined lives are filled with eternally hopeful despair. This is a different sort of horror film. Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) and Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly) are lovers in Brooklyn with dreams of setting up a small business and spending the rest of their lives in love--their version of the American dream. The two are also desperate heroin addicts, a compulsion that darkens their lives and leads Harry to repeatedly pawn his mother's television. His mother, Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), is addicted to television, which is why she keeps replacing the stolen set. One day she receives a call from her favorite show, the surreal TAPPY TIBBONS SHOW, and learns that she has been selected to appear on an upcoming broadcast. When she can't fit into her best red dress, her doctor prescribes diet pills (uppers), to which she swiftly and painfully becomes addicted. Harry's cohort, an intelligent hustler named Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), completes the foursome. With its unflinching dissection of addiction, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is a psychologically disturbing, visually captivating depiction of lost hope. The last half hour of the film is among the most harrowing of any film ever made. [More]
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Christopher McDonald, Keith David, Sean Gullette, Louise Lasser
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Screenwriter: Darren Aronofsky, Hubert Selby, Jr.
Composer: Clint Mansell
Studio: Artisan Entertainment
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Reviews for Requiem for a Dream
A horrifyingly honest yet stylish portrayal of addictions and their inevitable end.
... when the process of finding this meaning is mired in the storyteller's self-indulgent tendencies and harrowing repetitious visuals, the effort is rendered reprehensible.
There's a wholehearted commitment in every frame toward synthesizing the feeling of hopeless addiction. It's in the writing. It's in the chaotic cinematography. It's in the actors' eyes.
Film lovers with a high threshold for unpleasantness will get a contact high from Aronofsky's muscular manipulations of imagery and editing.
Requiem for a Dream is like a late-night ghost story that can only be told with all the lights out, and which haunts the memory long after you've left the theatre.
One of the most powerful I have ever seen. The film's score and editing will haunt you for years to come.
Yes, visually this is an exhilarating, unique film. But it is also a singularly difficult and challenging film to watch.
Accompanied by mournful violin music performed by the Kronos Quartet, the sequences are both jarring and intoxicating.
Requiem for a Dream is an outright horrific addiction yarn. In Aronofsky's hands it springs to demonic visual life, its reference points being German expressionism, shock cinema, and the great American tradition of the loser.
A brilliant bringdown, a swirling evocation of nightmares, illusions and hallucinations.
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.
As he did in his stunning debut, director Darren Aronofsky shows himself to be keenly tuned into the imagery of the living hell.
If this film doesn't convince a drug addict to abandon their habit, no outside influence can be expected to. Pure and simply, this is Requiem For a Nightmare.
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