Requiem for a Dream

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

No one interested in the power and magic of movies should miss it.

Philadelphia Inquirer Desmond Ryan

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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

May be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

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.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Burstyn is astonishing, forsaking all vanity to make silly biddy Sara a fully dimensioned human being.

Dallas Observer Bill Gallo

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.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Be warned: it's a downer, and a knockout.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

A work of art whose beauty has the eternal power of redemption.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

An unrelentingly dark vision that's as hard to watch as it is impossible to walk away from.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Locks in on its self-destructive subjects so precisely, it's almost unbearable to watch.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Easily the most searing movie-going experience of the year.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

A powerful fable about love and addiction that manages to be darkly humorous when it isn't graphic or harrowing in the extreme.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

The tremendous power of Aronofsky's filmmaking -- its omnivorous omnipotence, if that makes any sense -- has the curious effect of diluting its emotional impact.

Austin Chronicle Sarah Hepola

Haunts the memory long after you've left the theatre.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

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.

Variety Todd McCarthy

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

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

This bleak vision directed by Darren Aronofsky ("Pi") is pointless with good reason.

Film.com Peter Brunette

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.

Slate David Edelstein

Becomes increasingly unwatchable -- not just bleak but punishing, as if the director wants to fry your circuits along with his characters'.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Aronofsky has given us a well-acted, gorgeously overwrought and luridly entertaining exploitation flick -- a midnight movie for future generations.

TNT RoughCut J. Rentilly

Chilling and technically proficient and, also, fairly hollow.

TNT RoughCut J. Rentilly

Chilling and technically proficient and, also, fairly hollow.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

To be fair, Aronofsky has a knack for stylistic overkill, and his hammering onslaught is undeniably riveting, at first anyway.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

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.

LA Weekly Paul Malcolm

Far too complex and provoking.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

Never the heart-wrenching emotional experience it seems intended to be.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

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.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

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.

Film.com Ernest Hardy

Too self-consciously dark, too aware of its long, murky, art-designed descent into the underbelly of America's addictive personality.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

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.