Kritiken

Aronofsky’s film-making is neither subtle nor tasteful, two words you wouldn’t tend to apply to heroin addiction either. Its excesses feel grounded, however oppressively, in the hellish experience of all its characters – it’s surely the most stylishly made drug drama ever to escape any accusations of glamorising the scene.

Darren Aronofsky’s sophomore feature is undeniably accomplished, fully realized in its single-minded, fearless intensity, but it’s also, quite frankly, pretty melodramatic and dumb. Requiem for a Dream is an uncompromised, relentless descent into hell with just one thing on its mind: Drugs are really, really bad for you.

He [Aronofsky] has said that he is searching for completely subjective cinema and this is it - as you career headlong, sometimes literally, into the characters' nightmare. This is, without a doubt, cutting-edge film-making.

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. But without it, Aronofsky's film is chilling, and diamond-hard.

Requiem for a Dream... 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.

Once Requiem for a Dream accumulates all this elaborate and suggestive paraphernalia, it plummets in an inexorable, almost mechanical spiral... Whether these flourishes belong more to Selby or Aronofsky doesn't really matter--they can split the difference for all I care. I'd rather be back in the first half of this movie, where the flourishes of both artists still mean something.

I’m not being facetious when I urge you to see three-quarters of Requiem for a Dream for its astonishing technique and the acting of Leto and Burstyn and (especially) Connelly. Stay for an hour and a half and skip out when the title reads, “Winter.” Really, you won’t miss anything important.

Anyone under 17 who is thinking of experimenting with drugs might want to see this movie, which plays like a travelogue of hell.

After the young director's phenomenal debut with the barely budgeted ''Pi,'' which was like watching a middleweight boxer win a fight purely on reflexes, he comes back with a picture that shows maturation. He has skills, and what works both for him and against him is that he is in as much of a jittery delirium as his characters.

It’s technically striking filmmaking, to be sure, but what it’s presenting is nothing that many people will want to look at.