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90A triumph of low-end production design, shot in sizzling, solarized black and white, and driven by a propulsive, insinuating score, Pi is a horror movie that makes you think and an indie film that makes you squirm.
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Aronofsky's ability to capture the rush and confusion of racing down a timeline toward infinity, only to suddenly slam into a dead end, makes for impressive and occasionally disturbing stuff.
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90It is a brilliant intellectual adventure that fans of bold independent filmmaking will want to experience, even though the ending is something of a letdown.
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88The seductive thing about Aronofsky's film is that it is halfway plausible in terms of modern physics and math.
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80It's precisely when Pi is the most arty and least "commercial," when it's serving up head scratchers instead of intrigue, that it's most entertaining.
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80Whatever its faults -- and it has more than a few -- it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller.
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80This is very much a first feature, with all the hyperbolic, sometimes indiscriminate cinematic energy of a student film. But it's also sensational, a febrile meditation on the mathematics of existence.
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78Brilliant, surreal, and emotionally draining, this first feature from American Film Institute grad Aronofsky recalls such low-budget sci-fi epics as "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" and more traditional paranoiac suspense films (Adrian Lyne's "Jacob's Ladder" in particular, but also Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby") and yet manages to be a wholly original animal.
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75This intellectual allegory would carry more punch if it didn't slip into melodrama so often, but it marks Aronofsky as an exceptionally promising new filmmaker.
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75It proceeds, weirdly enough, from the truly annoying to the absolutely fascinating.
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Pi will not be for everyone, but for those who are fed up with the mainstream idiocy that gets dumped into theaters each summer, this movie willbe like a great big palate-clearing taste of sorbet.
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75For anyone who wants a movie to feed their intelligence and imagination more than their eyes and ears, Pi is a solid choice.
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75Audacious and bursting with ideas, the paranoid little sci-fi independent film Pi marks an auspicious debut for New York writer Darren Aronofsky.
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75The movie's freakazoid intensity gets to you, but there's something at once cramped and show-offy in Aronofsky's refusal to even slighty vary its atmosphere of shock-corridor burnout.
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70As smart as it is, Pi is awfully hard to watch. Filmed with hand-held cameras in splotchy black-and-white and crudely edited, it has the style and attitude of a no-budget midnight movie.
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70The film's imaginative, diverse images create a mind's-eye urban claustrophobia; such intensity may exhaust over 85 minutes' course, but it's never less than impressive.
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Pi may be the most engrossing piece of cyberpunk cinema yet.
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Aronofsky's delirious, Kafkaesque writing and imaginatively distorted camerawork don't quite add up, but it's fascinating, hallucinogenic film work.
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60Its power lies both in Aronofsky's evocation of tightly wound paranoia and in his flawless dovetailing of personal obsession and cultural anxieties.
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60Director Darren Aronofsky, creates an eerie "Eraserhead"-like world that keeps the film compelling even when it digresses into a silly cat-and-mouse psychodrama.
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60Shot in grainy, high contrast black-and-white with a lot of simple but effective optical and aural tricks to suggest the workings of his unusual mind, this is one of the most intimate movies in recent memory.
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60In the end, it's primarily a brain teaser, obtuse and ultimately limited in its emotional impact.
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With this odd mixture of elements the film's tone is gloomy, portentous, and hysterical, yet at the same time strangely earnest and square, as if David Lynch had tried to somehow make a movie version of Scientific American.
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Positive: 10 out of 13
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Mixed: 1 out of 13
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Negative: 2 out of 13
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