Pi

(Artisan)

Although at 85 minutes it's actually a little long, Darren Aronofsky's film is a tour de force of metaphysical cinema, with Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette, very effective at looking intense and miserable) as a kind of Travis Bickle of the abstract, cruising the mean streets of the mental labyrinth in his crammed Brooklyn apartment as he searches for a transcendent pattern in the endlessly random value of the title mathematical function. Despite the mind-boggling but unsatisfactory ending, the film remains haunting in its bold style and speculations.