Pi (1999)

Darren Aronofsky scored best director at Sundance last year with the brainy thriller Pi, which stars Sean Gullette as Max Cohen, a twitchy math whiz obsessing over the titular number. Both a messianic sect and a Wall Street firm figure that Max is onto a big mystical whatsit, which leads to a chase crammed with Eraserhead homages and derivative paranoiac freak-outs. But whenever Aronofsky makes something new from his febrile soundtrack and stark black-and-white images, he strikes a claustrophobic mood potent enough to induce panic. B-