Darren Aronofsky, whose "Black Swan" is now showing here, debuted with the cult flick "Pi" (1997), about a slightly mad math whiz who was convinced there was a pattern in stock market fluctuations that could reveal the markets' movements. As the film's hero put it, "Mathematics is the language of nature; everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge."
Along comes that film's real-life equivalent in economist Steven Levitt, who took those ideas to the bank with his best-selling book, "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." Co-authored with New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, the book's sales currently top 4 million — the kind of numbers that these days pretty much demand a cinematic tie-in.
"Freakonomics" the movie has a kind of "A-Team" of hip American documentary directors, with Morgan Spurlock ("Super Size Me"), Seth Gordon ("The King of Kong"), the prolific Alex Gibney ("Gonzo") and Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady ("Jesus Camp") each tackling separate topics from the book, along with casual interviews with Levitt and Dubner.