Requiem for a dream

An IMDb Top 250 movie

What sounded like the title of a bad 70s symphonic rock album turned out to be a visually exciting maelstrom about addiction. What begins as a fairly quiet, amost overly relaxed movie about drug addiction (the teenager who keeps stealing his own mom's TV set, and the mom who keeps buying it back from the pawn shop), quickly descends down an ever darker spiral of abuse and self-abuse.
The mom turns out to be unseparable from her favorite infomercial and her diet pills, while her son and his drug buddies get more and more desperate, and less and less successful, in acquiring their next fix. The movie ends in nightmarish collage of all major characters reaching rock bottom, each in their own horrible way.
Most (indie) directors would choose to film such urban despair in gritty black-and-white, but Darren Aronofsky opts for vivid use of lighting and coloring, and rapid sequences of shots (the Trivia section of IMDb mentions that "[m]ost movies contain 600 to 700 cuts. Requiem for a Dream contains over 2,000").
My only objection to the movie is that you could see it as too pretentious, too artsy-fartsy for what is still a fairly straightforward plot. But to be honest, I found that the combination of the visuals and the story was effective.