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Critics Consensus: Dramatically gripping and frighteningly smart, this Lynchian thriller does wonders with its unlikely subject and shoestring budget.
Critic Consensus: Dramatically gripping and frighteningly smart, this Lynchian thriller does wonders with its unlikely subject and shoestring budget.
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All Critics (58) | Top Critics (13) | Fresh (51) | Rotten (7) | DVD (4)
Aronofsky, who has parlayed this movie's Sundance success into two Hollywood deals, is that rare indie filmmaker who doesn't want to make hip romantic sitcoms. He's a genuine experimenter with a spooky visual style.
We share Max's feelings of imminent psychological disintegration as the film probes our own insecurity in the face of the eternal. Maths meets millennial doom in one of the decade's true originals.
It's remarkable to what extent Aronofsky has rendered the cerebral kinetically intense. The film's imaginative, diverse images create a mind's-eye urban claustrophobia.
Audacious and bursting with ideas.
The movie's low-budget look neatly matches the claustrophobia of Max's life, but the filmmakers have also devised some special shooting methods for certain scenes. These sequences -- breathless and jangly chases, for the most part -- look terrific.
Pi turns what should be a metaphoric relationship into a stupefyingly literal-minded thriller.
...Aronofsky's taste for including horror in his films is evident from his very first feature...
Restricted as an up-and-coming filmmaker, Aronofsky didn't conform to convention and instead delivered his art full throttle...
A workout, no question, and not for everyone, but it has intellectual and spiritual fervor, and even when it stops dead for some mystical exposition, at least it assumes our intelligence (though also our patience).
A tour-de-force of grainy, high-contrast black-and-white photography and inventive editing and sound design, π at times ventures to the limits of cinematic legibility.
Pi accomplishes so much more with...its micro-budget than a Hollywood production could.
a real treat
This cautionary parable brings up the age-old question of whether our drive for power through deeper knowledge of the natural world will also carry us to our personal or possibly collective annihilation. It reminds me of the revelation that it's not our fear of failure that prevents us from trying something, but rather our fear of success. What happens when our capabilities accelerate faster than we can understand them? We find out one possibility as we follow a man haunted with an obsession to discover the core numerical pattern behind all things and behaviors in the universe.
Super Reviewer
It is a highly disturbing and bizarre film, yet despite its dizzying--and somewhat unnerving, off-putting tone--it is brilliantly and artistically constructed. Darren Aronofsky is able to bring to life a unique, engaging story while using elements of legendary filmmaker Roman Polanski's best films. Pi is able to achieve what many other so-called "psychological thrillers" are not capable of due to its fantastic cinematography--which creates an appropriately suffocating environment--and its ingenious film editing.
This gritty, low budget, black and white indie thriller is the debut of the maverick auteur Darren Aronofsky. Set in New York's Chinatown, the film follows a reclusive mathematician who, for the past ten years, has been working on cracking the code behind the numerical pattern of the stock market. The closer he gets to the solution, the more chaotic the world becomes around him. Dogged by both a ruthless Wall Street firm and some shady Kaballah sect intent on using him to decode the Torah, Max becomes increasingly detached from reality and sanity. This is a really stunning picture. I give it major props for having a unique vision, killer art direction and set design, and being done independently on the cheap. The math angle is a little out there, but not so obscure that it is impossible for a lay person to follow. Even then, this isn't a film for everyone, but if you like mind benders, borderline sci-fi thrillers, and enjoy seeing films about people who go nuts, then this is a film for you.
Let's face the truth,we all have wished ,at least for once in our lives,to be a genius ,isn't that right?But insanity and inteligence go hand by hand, these little neighbors,can make your mind play tricks on you.Still not convinced ?Then take a closer look at Pi and maybe you won't be that jealous of that special gift, or would you ? Find out by watching it!
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