Pi

It isn't often that a movie can get by on visual imagination alone, but Darren Aronofsky's vivid debut, shot in 16mm for about the cost of a Two-Cheeseburger Value Meal at McDonald's (sans "super-size" upgrade), is just such a rarity; watching it with the volume turned all the way down might well be even more rewarding than using both eyes and ears. The plot, which involves a tormented computer genius (Sean Gullette) and his attempts to discover patterns in the stock market via a mathematical equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, is resoundingly stupid, although Aronofsky does his best to obscure this fact with a mountain of technological jargon and multisyllabic words. (When the dialogue is comprehensible, it tends toward the painfully overwrought: "This is madness, Max." "Or maybe it's genius!") Ultimately, however, it doesn't matter whether you're hooting at the melodramatic narrative lurches or mad-scientist clichés, because the high-contrast black-and-white cinematography and harrowing flights of aesthetic fancy (e.g., a nightmarish sequence in which our hero finds a pulsating human brain in a New York subway station) more than compensate. For a neophyte, Aronofsky has a remarkably sophisticated eye, and clearly he's got ambition to spare. For his next project, all he needs is a halfway decent script. Recommended. (M. D'Angelo)