Requiem for a Dream: Critic Reviews

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.

[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.

"Dream" glamorizes nothing en route to a near-nauseating finale, which feels like a rollercoaster car hitched off the track and hurtled into hell's depths. A decade later, it still follows through with full force on its cautionary stomach punch.

"Requiem For A Dream" is a movie about drug addiction, but that's only where the plot resides so the thoroughly drawn characters can work toward their imperfect dreams. Cinema history has been made with this

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.

If Aronofsky set out to make Trainspotting look like Teletubbies, he succeeded. Recommended only for those with extremely strong stomachs.

Requiem for a Dream is meant to have a hallucinatory, mesmerizing quality, but it manages to be about as enlightening as a bad acid trip.

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

Requiem for a Dream is a great movie, and the few of us who see it will be acutely affected.

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.

With this movie, Aronofsky sends a couple of messages. One, of course, is about how much habitual drug use can fuel your delusions and what that combination can take away from you. The other message is that the director is now a major American filmmaker.

It's the type of experience that you will never cry at in the theater, but will cry at long after, as the message fully sinks in.

An unordinary, highly stylized, gritty hyperkinetic junkie movie -- unlike anything you've seen before.

Never have we been taken this close to the edge and never have the characters teetering over it elicited so much sympathy. Requiem is difficult to watch but it richly rewards those who stay with it.

Regulation viewing for people who think they know better, and the most chilling fix of genius in years.

This harrowing look at the perils of addiction -- whether it be food, television, fame, sex, or drugs and alcohol -- has to rank as one of the year's most genuinely disturbing films.

I found it appropriate that I had trouble looking away.

Brilliantly shot, uncompromising film, with career-best performances from its stars -- the 'feel-bad' movie of the year, this demands to be seen.

As he did in his stunning debut, director Darren Aronofsky shows himself to be keenly tuned into the imagery of the living hell.

What an inappropriately drowsy title for such an explosive film.

No, it's not a movie for the faint of heart. Aronofsky has designed "Requiem" as a kind of psychotic symphony, in which the mundane becomes ever more menacing as the quartet free-fall into their own separate hells.

...will leave those who decide to take the chance feeling winded by the time the credits roll. Maybe even terrified.

This Dream doesn't stir much beyond stereotype.

... 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.