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Requiem for a Dream is a movie directed by Darren Aronofsky featuring Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Ellen Burstyn and Marlon Wayans. Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr.

A brutal movie, both because of the subject as well as the aesthetics, about the world of drugs.

This is a story about degradation which, led by the poetry of despair, has become (well deservedly) a cult movie.

Movie Review

This is a movie with a brutal potential for aesthetics: it moves and perverts and degrades and attracts, all in the whirlpool of emotions the characters experience who are submerged in the world of drugs. A misleading “hand camera” film that takes us through the stories of four characters in their four personal hells and the Requiem they all entone together with a social and systemic point of view, because the réquiem is also pertinent socially.

However, what we are interested...

While many “feel good” movies are exhaulted with ad lines exclaiming “a celebration of life”, this new “dramedy” might best be tagged as, well, not a celebration, but rather “an exploration of life…and death”. Yes, the “D-word” figures most prominently in this piece, but from a most unexpected angle. It concerns a man from a strict religious order, a Hasidic man, who finds no real comfort from his faith after death takes his beloved, and so he turns, not to drugs or booze, but to science. He cannot put his life back into order until he knows the length of time for flesh to turn To Dust.

We meet the focus of the story, a cantor in Upstate New York named Shumel (Geza Rohrig) on probably the worst day of his life as his wife succumbs to cancer. As her body is quickly washed and prepared for near immediate burial,...

The mordant side of Jewish humor is pushed to an extreme in Shawn Snyder’s debut feature “To Dust.” This gently absurdist — yet also sometimes downright icky — tale revolves around a grief-stricken Hasidic widower who enlists a Gentile biology teacher in an obsessive quest to grasp the decomposition process of his late wife’s body. As story concepts go, that’s an exceptionally unappealing one, particularly for what plays mostly as a low-key buddy comedy. Nonetheless, the deft execution and astute lead performances ultimately make this acquired taste of a movie not only digestible, but rather charming.

Despite the considerable support of his Upstate New York Orthodox community and all its reassuring rituals around death, 40ish cantor Shmuel can’t seem to cope after his spouse dies of cancer. His live-in mother (Janet Sarno) provides for the basic needs of his two young sons, but they have their own grief and other emotional wants,...