Requiem for a Dream

Across the seasons of a single year, the film follows four people in Brooklyn: Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow who becomes dependent on amphetamine diet pills, and her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion and his friend Tyrone, whose heroin use hardens into desperation. Their separate hopes narrow into compulsion.

The film traces how fantasy and craving drive addiction toward psychosis and the disintegration of the self, cutting between the four lives as each collapses. It gives a therapist an unsparing study of dependency and delusion. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 2001 for Ellen Burstyn, and is adapted from the novel Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.