Pi (1998)

Darren Aronofsky’s first feature is shot in black and white so coarse it looks photocopied: a face pressed hard against the frame, the symbol for pi glowing out of a field of digits.

Pi follows a paranoid mathematician searching for a key number behind the patterns found in nature, pushed between brilliance and obsession. Sean Gullette stars, with Mark Margolis and Ben Shenkman, and Aronofsky wrote it with Gullette and Eric Watson. It runs 84 minutes and opened in 1998, the year it won Aronofsky the directing award at Sundance.

A24’s 25th anniversary edition restores the film in 4K, inside a black and white sleeve of numbers and leaves.