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Requiem for a Dream
Metascore
68 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 32 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 22 out of 32
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 32
  3. Negative: 4 out of 32
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  1. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Desmond Ryan
    100
    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.
  2. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Bob Graham
    100
    He (Aronofsky) has put together a phantasmagoria of self-destructive obsession that is so visually astounding it becomes its own saving grace. Otherwise, we might not be able to bear it.
  3. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    100
    May be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.
  4. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    100
    No one interested in the power and magic of movies should miss it.
    All this critic's reviews
  5. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    91
    Burstyn is astonishing, forsaking all vanity to make silly biddy Sara a fully dimensioned human being.
  6. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Bill Gallo
    90
    A fluent, intelligent piece of work whose sex and violence are anything but gratuitous, and exactly the kind of highly personal, no-holds-barred vision of life on the ragged edge that independents always aspire to but rarely have the goods to achieve.
  7. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Thomas
    90
    A work of art whose beauty has the eternal power of redemption.
  8. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    90
    Be warned: it's a downer, and a knockout.
  9. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    88
    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.
  10. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    88
    Easily the most searing movie-going experience of the year.
  11. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    88
    Locks in on its self-destructive subjects so precisely, it's almost unbearable to watch.
  12. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Foreman
    88
    A powerful fable about love and addiction that manages to be darkly humorous when it isn't graphic or harrowing in the extreme.
  13. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Chris Kaltenbach
    88
    An unrelentingly dark vision that's as hard to watch as it is impossible to walk away from.
  14. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    80
    The tremendous power of Aronofsky's filmmaking -- its omnivorous omnipotence, if that makes any sense -- has the curious effect of diluting its emotional impact.
  15. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Sarah Hepola
    78
    Haunts the memory long after you've left the theatre.
  16. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    75
    Often, Requiem for a Dream is as technically inventive and daring as the Scottish heroin film "Trainspotting," but it has more resonance and feeling. And when Burstyn is on screen, it often becomes heartbreaking.
  17. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Michael Atkinson
    70
    May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.
  18. Film.com
    Reviewed by: Peter Brunette
    70
    Love it or hate it -- and I suspect, frankly, most people are going to hate it -- this is like no other film you've ever seen.
  19. Slate
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    70
    Becomes increasingly unwatchable -- not just bleak but punishing, as if the director wants to fry your circuits along with his characters'.
  20. Variety
    Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    70
    It’s technically striking filmmaking, to be sure, but what it’s presenting is nothing that many people will want to look at.
  21. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Lisa Alspector
    70
    This bleak vision directed by Darren Aronofsky ("Pi") is pointless with good reason.
  22. San Francisco Examiner
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    63
    It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.
  23. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    60
    Aronofsky has given us a well-acted, gorgeously overwrought and luridly entertaining exploitation flick -- a midnight movie for future generations.
  24. TNT RoughCut
    Reviewed by: J. Rentilly
    60
    Chilling and technically proficient and, also, fairly hollow.
  25. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    58
    To be fair, Aronofsky has a knack for stylistic overkill, and his hammering onslaught is undeniably riveting, at first anyway.
  26. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    50
    Solid acting helps the story stay earthbound when Aronofsky's filmmaking gets addicted to its own flashy cynicism, but the picture sometimes seems as dazed and confused as the situations it wants to criticize.
  27. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Paul Malcolm
    50
    Far too complex and provoking.
  28. Mr. Showbiz
    Reviewed by: Kevin Maynard
    49
    Never the heart-wrenching emotional experience it seems intended to be.
  29. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Jay Carr
    38
    It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort. That, and not its unsavory subject matter, is what makes it bummer theater.
  30. Film.com
    Reviewed by: Ernest Hardy
    30
    Too self-consciously dark, too aware of its long, murky, art-designed descent into the underbelly of America's addictive personality.
  31. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    30
    While director Aronofsky pistol-whips your attention with his style, the characters (mostly relegated to human mannequins in Aronofsky's visual schemes) suffer big time.
  32. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    20
    In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.
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User Reviews

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User Score
8.5 out of 10

Universal acclaim- based on 212 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 103 out of 115
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 115
  3. Negative: 9 out of 115
  1. RoryP.
    5
    I think this film is overrated. Although it is an awful lot better then his last film, the Fountain. The film reliance on style causes problems, especially in the first act, where we are introduced to split screen and various other stylistic devices for no other reason then to give the film a professional sheen. There use in these areas were shallow and pointless, they did not progess any element of the story. I think if Aronofsky had laid off at the beginning and let the stylistic devices build up as the addictions took hold, it could have been a much better film. There is little character development. It appears to be a film situated in an ‘immediate now’ of sorts, fueled by a narrative drive that is preoccupied with the visual descent of the characters into drug addiction (and hence the stylistic flourishes to portray its effects) rather then the characters themselves. Certain sections do manage to blend both style and character in a way that provides the appearance of depth, such as the effective, often claustrophobic conveyance of setting and the conviction of the cast in portraying their characters. Sara Goldfarb’s/Ellen Burstyn’s addiction to diet pills is visualized in a way that manages to exhibit her loneliness, her anxieties, and hence some of the reasons she began taking pills in the first place. However, we do not learn anything about the younger characters. Despite an excellent cast’s best efforts to inject some rounded humanity, this flatness of characterization is emphasized further by a plot structure that, despite the jazzed up visuals, is utterly predictable in narrative execution. You are well aware from the beginning that things are going to spiral down the murky drainpipe of dated anti-drug finger wagging (its format is taken from the 1968 novel of the same name.) This old fashioned design the story is caged within, damages the integrity of a film that is clearly striving for some kind of modern respectability through its imaginative camerawork, whiplash editing and a score mixing pretty cinematic orchestration with urgent trendiness. It would be unfair to assume that to create a relevant film within this format would be impossible. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a film about addiction without dramatizing the inevitable cycle of self destruction that goes along with it. But unlike films such as Trainspotting, Requiem fails to capitalize on its involving sheen by providing the viewer something beyond the horrifically hypnotic images of escapism gone awry. The majesty of Aronofsky’s visual technique drowns out any major possibility of character development and fails to create a sense of human depth for the viewer to bite into. Without the substance supplied by a detailed focus on character, all we are left with is a somewhat hollow, albeit impressive, exercise in visual invention.… Full Review »
  2. twest55
    10
    Fine piece of work. From every aspect. You can tell the cast and crew worked so hard to compose a phenomenal film, like nothing you have seen before.… Full Review »
  3. ChrisK
    0
    It is the most overrated and dangerous movie atrocity ever. It takes every stereotype about drugs and drug abuse and reinforces those stereotypes to absurdist, kafkaesque levels. Comparisons to the propaganda classic "Reefer Madness" (go watch it at archive.org and spot the similarities) are both valid and necessary. People who know nothing (and want to know nothing) about how addiction works give this film a high rating because it confirms their infantile views (Drugs=Evil)on the issues dealt with in the movie. Cater ignorance to the ignorant. Always a wise business decision.… Full Review »
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