Darren Aronofsky is one of the most provocative and divisive filmmakers working today, someone who is not afraid of pushing buttons and making audiences uncomfortable. He also possesses an incredible technical mastery, with stunning cinematography and precision-crafted editing, that adds even more oomph to his already powerful stories.
This week his latest, the ‘90s-set crime caper “Caught Stealing,” arrives in theaters. It’s yet another left turn for a filmmaker whose career is made up almost entirely of unexpected moves. Starring Austin Butler as a former baseball player turned bartender, it feels like a movie that would have come out in 1998, in that post-“Pulp Fiction” glow. But it is also imbibed with the filmmaker’s fascination with darkness; there’s a grimness that courses through “Caught Stealing” that is pure Aronofsky.
But where does his latest rank among his filmography? Read on to find out.
9. “The Whale” (2022)
“The Whale” is a fascinating part of Aronofsky’s filmography. Based on the play by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the screenplay, and released by the art house wizards at A24, it stars Brendan Fraser as a morbidly obese professor who is struggling to reconnect with his daughter (Sadie Sink), while attempting to contain his more suicidal tendencies. Critics absolutely hated it, labeling it schmaltzy and offensive. (Vanity Fair’s review called it a “posturing labor” while the Wall Street Journal said it amounted to little more than “a variation of torture porn for highbrows.”)
And yet the movie itself is handsomely made and emotionally resonant; even if it is overly sentimental, it still packs a punch. It was a huge financial hit, making almost $60 million on a budget of around $3 million. It was an awards player too, including being nominated for three Academy Awards, winning two (including Fraser for Best Actor). In terms of Aronofsky’s filmography, it’s an odd outlier – a financial success and Oscar-winner that received some of the most vitriolic reviews of his career.
8. “Noah” (2014)
After the massive success of “Black Swan” Aronofsky could do anything. And what he chose to do was “Noah” – a biblical epic, with Russell Crowe as the title character, that also doubled as a deeply-felt environmental screed. While the film courted the faith-based crowd (Paramount even released the movie over the Easter weekend), it ultimately proved too weird and aggressive. It made almost $360 million worldwide, but with a budget rumored to be as high as $160 million, it’s unclear if the movie even made a profit. This response was a shame, because “Noah” is endlessly engaging, especially for seasoned Aronofsky heads. At times, if you squint just right, it looks like a traditional biblical tale, one that we all know and love (with Noah taking two of every animal to repopulate the earth after a global flood), but Aronofsky embroiders with all kinds of appreciable strangeness. Take, for instance, the watchers, fallen angels stranded on earth that help Noah with his quest. They are craggy rock monsters, jerkily animated by Industrial Light & Magic in the style of old Ray Harryhausen stop-motion and voiced by Nick Nolte and Frank Langella. Completely unforgettable.
The movie’s thematic concerns are just as incredible, as the endless flood has many modern parallels with our own ongoing environmental catastrophe. Noah was many things, including a zealot, but here he is also something of a prophet – harbinger for our own climate change crisis.
7. “mother!” (2017)
Almost universally hated (it is one of the rare movies to receive an “F” Cinemascore), “mother!” is perhaps the most underrated film in Aronofsky’s filmography, a 121-minute panic attack that will leave you puzzled, angered and perhaps moved. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem play a couple whose tranquil life in the country is interrupted by the arrival of another couple (played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfieffer). Soon, everything goes to hell. Quite literally. The symbolism in “mother!” is piled high, until it reaches its freakout climax that is too insane to even describe. (You’re either with it or you aren’t.)
Aronofsky’s mastery of both technique (the entire movie is composed of just three types of shots) and tone (including how the movie can toggle between disparate tones in a single scene) makes the whole thing a galvanizing hoot, but only if you are on its peculiar wavelength. Critics were generally kind (The Playlist called it “something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf”) but audiences roundly rejected it. That’s okay. This “mother!” doesn’t need you.
6. “Caught Stealing” (2025)
If audiences were annoyed by the marketing of “mother!,” which promised it as a straightforward, movie star-led horror movie, then they’ll probably have a fit about “Caught Stealing.” It is being sold as an upbeat 1990s-set crime caper, with baseball-phenom-turned-alcoholic-bartender Austin Butler and his nurse girlfriend Zoë Kravitz on the run from a bunch of underworld goons (among them: Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio and musician Bad Bunny). But the movie is considerably darker than it is being promoted as; an early scene has Butler getting beat up by some thugs and losing a kidney. Yeah. Pretty serious.
Occasionally that darkness threatens to drag “Caught Stealing” down but thankfully it maintains its buoyancy over a spritely 107 minutes. Aronofsky’s clearly having the time of his life playing with the film’s $40 million budget, sending a drone through the Unisphere in Queens and mounting impressive car chases and bloody shootouts. It might seem outside the realm of possibilities, but the movie was based on a novel by Charlie Huston; there were two more books featuring Butler’s character. Could “Caught Stealing” be Aronofsky’s first franchise? Stranger things have happened.
5. “Requiem for a Dream” (2000)
For Aronofsky’s sophomore feature he adapted Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel “Requiem for a Dream,” and in doing so made one of the most powerful drug films of all time. The problem is that, no matter how dazzling the filmmaking is and how engrossing the performers are, the film is so crushingly, oppressively bleak that it is hard to revisit often (if ever). It follows a group of characters (among them Jared Leto, Ellen Burstyn, Marlon Wayans and Jennifer Connelly) dealing with their respective addictions until, by the end of the movie, they are totally obliterated by it.
The movie was so hardcore (and so hard to watch) that the ratings board stamped it with an NC-17, which would limit the movie’s distribution and reach. Aronofsky fought it and eventually the movie was released unrated. Two versions appeared for its then-lucrative home video release; the R-rated version had a debaucherous sex scene edited. But the movie’s power arrives in its extremes. Some critics fell under its singular spell (Entertainment Weekly said that it “may be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves”) while others most certainly did not (the Boston Globe said it was just “two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort”). It still earned Burstyn an Academy Award nomination, although it’s hard to imagine the ossified voting body watching even a fraction of a movie, let alone the whole thing. 25 years later, its influence is still felt, particularly in the way it was edited – we’re still grooving to the rhythms of “Requiem for a Dream.”
4. “The Wrestler” (2008)
After “The Fountain” fizzled spectacularly, Aronofsky returned to low-cost independent filmmaking and mounted an impressive comeback. “The Wrestler,” made on a budget of just $6 million, stars Mickey Rourke as a washed-up former wrestler as he navigates middle-age as a has-been, drug-addled nobody. Much of the movie is derived from the power of Rourke’s performance, both on its surface and through its many metatextual layers. He was, after all, an astoundingly handsome and profoundly talented performer with a penchant for self-sabotage that ultimately sidelined what could have been an awe-inspiring career. (Even after “The Wrestler,” he defaulted; his last somewhat mainstream role was as the devil in 2024’s faith-based “Not Another Church Movie.”)
Of course Arnofsky surrounds Rourke with terrific actors, including Marisa Tomei as his stripper girlfriend and Evan Rachel Wood as his estranged daughter. Aronofsky shoots the movie naturalistically, with handheld camerawork putting you into the hardscrabble world. Rourke and Tomei were nominated for Oscars and the movie was widely regarded as one of the year’s best. Aronofsky was back, baby.
3. “Black Swan” (2010)
Aronofsky picked up his first (and so far only) Oscar nomination for Best Director for “Black Swan,” a phantasmagorical ballet thriller that stars Natalie Portman as a prodigy going through a mental breakdown. In some ways it’s a companion piece to “The Wrestler,” with characters that push themselves beyond their physical limit and ultimately leap off the stage (most likely to either deaths), but “Black Swan” is more playful and engaging and, dare we say it, fun. For “Black Swan” Aronofsky was drawing heavily on Satoshi Kon’s earlier animated masterpiece “Perfect Blue,” sometimes borrowing exact shots or entire scenes from that film, along with classical ballet, “The Red Shoes,” the doppelgängers of Brian De Palma and the body horror of David Cronenberg.
But these parallels between “Black Swan” and other films are a feature not a bug; the kitsch that is built into the movie also gives it essential life. And the film connected with “Black Swan” and all of its peculiarities. It made $330 million at the box office (it was just re-released into IMAX screens) and was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture. Natalie Portman even took home the award for Best Actress. If nothing else “Black Swan” proved that Aronofsky could maintain his jittery intensity and still find mainstream success.
2. “Pi” (1998)
Aronofsky’s first feature was a skittering black-and-white gem that established him as one of the world’s most exciting young filmmakers. It also points to the way that independent cinema, in the 1990s, was a vibrant, thrilling landscape for new artistic voices – and that those voices were embraced and given large platforms, instead of being shoved into some corner (or onto a streaming service). “Pi” was shot on 16mm utilizing handheld cameras by cinematographer Matthew Libatique (who would go on to become one of the director’s key collaborators), as Aronofsky and his crew zoomed around New York. Sean Gullette plays Max, an unemployed mathematician who becomes unglued as he searches for the equation to everyday life. Infused with mysticism, philosophy and a barely contained, high-stakes energy (the running time a svelte 84 minutes), its unforgettable climax cemented Aronofsky as a fearless director and the movie as something of a modern classic.
What’s more, the director recently got the rights back to the movie, which he sold to A24. This restoration, now available on a must-have 4K UHD disc, has given new life to “Pi.” It’s rare to see a debut feature from a director so fully formed, so full of the ideas and techniques that would go on to define that filmmaker’s career, but with “Pi,” it’s all there. You can use it to decode his entire filmography.
1. “The Fountain” (2006)
The arduous, years-long behind-the-scenes production of “The Fountain” rivals the drama of the actual movie. Aronofsky began noodling on the project shortly after the release of “Requiem for a Dream.” Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett became attached and sets were being built in Australia, with the budget rumored to be around $70 million, with costs split between Warner Bros. and New Regency. But seven weeks before shooting was meant to start, Pitt abruptly pulled out of the production (he had requested changes to the screenplay that went unmet). Soon the project was completely shut down, with props and sets (including a 10-story Mayan temple) sold at auction. Aronofsky was so convinced the project would never happen he released a comic book version of his original script.
But eventually he returned to the project, willing to do it at reduced scale ($35 million) in the same scrappy style that he made “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream.” The ambition, however, remained. “The Fountain” tells a love story across 1,000 years, with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, Aronofsky’s wife at the time, playing three sets of characters, all consumed with the idea of the titular Fountain of Youth. In the 16th century Jackman plays a conquistador tasked with finding the Tree of Life in South America by a beautiful Queen Isabella (Weisz); in 2000 New York Jackman is a scientist excited by the possibility of a tree discovered in South America, hopefully to help cure his sick wife (Weisz); and in the distant future Jackman is a space man in a flying bubble looking to resurrect his wife (Weisz) by traveling to the ends of the known universe. We have seen these “across lifetimes”-type stories before (and since) but what makes “The Fountain” special is that down-to-the-studs approach Aronofsky took and his skillfulness in mixing-and-matching the stories, with images, motifs, and themes repeating from one to the other (and across all three). Jackman and Weisz give incredibly committed performances, which could have easily tipped into camp (derogatory) under the wrong circumstances. There’s a playfulness to the way Aronofsky stretches time and space but an earnestness with which he treats the emotions. It’s a movie that is as feeling as it is visually dazzling. What a feat indeed.
