Requiem for a Dream Reviews
A staccato narrative parallels the experiences and hallucinations of a woman on drugs with those of her son and his friends.
Burnished camerawork and ex-Pop Will Eat Itself head Mansell's part-punchy, part-elegiac score reinforce and counterpoint the increasingly nightmarish visuals.
Globe and Mail
Top Critic| Original Score: 2.5/4
[It] may be a bummer to some audiences, so harsh is its view of the drug culture. But no one interested in the power and magic of movies should miss it.
| Original Score: 5/5
One of those films you both admire and hate for admiring. I liked it in spite of myself.
Conveys, visually, sonically and dramatically, the siren call of addiction like no other movie has.
Both bleak and bleakly funny, appalling in its excesses and exhilarating in its execution.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Remarkable -- easily the most searing movie-going experience of the year.
Aronofsky has fashioned a chilling vision that lives up to the caustic irony of its title and gives us a nightmare that is not lightly forgotten.
Unfortunately, once Requiem for a Dream accumulates all this elaborate and suggestive paraphernalia, it plummets in an inexorable, almost mechanical spiral.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A phantasmagoria of self-destructive obsession that is so visually astounding it becomes its own saving grace.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
[A] graphically depressing, downward spiral to hell.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
It's a downer -- and far more because of Aronofsky's vanity than because of Selby's brutally candid story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Film lovers with a high threshold for unpleasantness will get a contact high from Aronofsky's muscular manipulations of imagery and editing.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
CNN.com
Top CriticOnce again, a young director with a wildly overpraised debut film has decided to forgo good taste in favor of advertising his own far-reaching "bravery."
Something like a poetry of degradation and sorrow.
Requiem for a Dream may be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.
This is Burstyn's strongest starring vehicle since she played a persecuted faith healer in Resurrection 20 years ago.
It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort.
For the strong of stomach and open of mind, Requiem delivers some bravura filmmaking flourishes.
Can a movie be banal and highly original at the same time? If so, that movie is Requiem for a Dream.
Dream proves a number of things: the audacity of director Darren Aronofsky's eye, the brilliance of Ellen Burstyn's acting and an apparent poverty of discernment or intelligence on the MPAA ratings board.
Hollywood Reporter
Top CriticMerely uses innovative means to tell a trite story.
Mr. Aronofsky draws astonishing performances from his actors.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
A powerful fable about love and addiction that manages to be darkly humorous when it isn't graphic or harrowing in the extreme.
Aronofsky is so compelling, so visionary a filmmaker, he keeps us riveted to his film as tightly as Sara is to her TV set.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Requiem for a Dream may be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Requiem for a Dream gets under your skin and stays there.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Disappointingly, the furor over Requiem for a Dream's rating is considerably more compelling than the film itself.
It's a dose of speed, and you can't say no.
It becomes so engrossed in the utter squalor of the lives of its characters that it doesn't leave much room for us nonaddicts to identify.
