Every Darren Aronofsky film, ranked: from ‘Black Swan’ to ‘The Whale’
With the Brooklyn-born director's new movie, 'Caught Stealing', on the horizon, we rank his filmography from worst to best to help familiarise yourself with his work
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DARREN ARONOFSKY has a good track record when it comes to awards races. Two of his lead actors have bagged Academy Awards for Best Actor and Actress in a Leading Role. His 2008 film The Wrestler took home the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The Brooklyn-born filmmaker has also bagged several Independent Spirit Awards for the Best Film and Best Director categories. We could run through the rest of his accolades, but that’s all to say Aronofsky is a sure contender when you see his name attached to a new film at the box office.
That said, you’ll be hearing more about Aronofsky’s new movie, Caught Stealing, as he and his A-list cast gear up for awards season. It follows Austin Butler as former baseball prodigy Hank Thompson after his no-good gangster neighbour (Matt Smith) leaves his cat with him to babysit. Looking after the mangy feline, the pet attracts unwanted attention from the New York City mobs, asking for the whereabouts of Hank’s neighbour.
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That’s a more straight-forward premise compared to some of Aronofsky’s previous works. But when it arrives in theatres on August 28, we’re sure it’ll prove it’s anything but. What it means for its lead, however, given Aronofsky’s Midas touch to his muses, is that Butler is after that second Oscar nomination after losing out in 2023 to Brendan Fraser in The Whale, another Aronofsky production.
So, if you wanted to familiarise yourself with the 56-year-old’s body of work, our definitive ranking of his films is a good place to start.
Darren Aronofsky’s best films, ranked
8. The Whale, 2022
I remember heading to the cinema with a friend and wanting to cry while watching The Whale. Everything I heard about it in the lead-up was how it marked the return of its lead, Brendan Fraser, in Hollywood, and his gut-wrenching performance. Character-wise, it had all the markings of Aronofsky’s idiosyncratic style: a reclusive gay and obese English lit teacher who teaches over Zoom (camera off), as he attempts to rekindle his strained relationship with his daughter (Sadie Sink).
I did not cry walking out of the cinema. And the only thing Aronofsky could think about by putting Fraser in a prosthetic fat suit was his gut. The director had hoped to beat critics to the punch, imagining the headlines to read: “Brendan Fraser, like you’ve never seen him before”. But hey, Fraser took home the Best Actor Oscar for the role. Though we can’t recall what he’s been in since.
7. Mother!, 2017
She’s so . . . Mother! At the time of its release, the Jennifer Lawrence-led film wasn’t so well-received. Chock full of metaphors and stress-inducing guitar string thrums, it wasn’t the easiest viewing experience compared to Noah before it, or as fabulous as Black Swan. But, Mother! does hint at Aronofsky’s remarkable ability to build and build tension in the unhinged arrangement that sees Lawrence and Javier Bardem play husband and wife, as he invites crowds of people to their quiet country house.
6. Noah, 2014
It was certainly a time to be in Catholic school when Aronofsky dropped Noah – his 2014 biblical epic about the famed ark that saved two of every animal from a world-consuming flood – and to have 10-year-olds talk about the American director. Starring Russell Crowe in the titular role, it also stars Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Anthony Hopkins, and Emma Watson in her first major role after wrapping the Harry Potter franchise. Not only was it a big swing for Aronofsky thematically, but it still stands as his most expensive production to date, working with a $125 million budget at the time.
5. Pi , 1998
We’ll place Aronofsky’s debut feature in the upper middle. Pi whiffs of the themes the Harvard grad would eventually make his mark with: the danger and madness that come from obsession. A native of New York City, the film established Aronofsky’s knack for bringing the city’s underbelly to the fore at a time when the cosmopolitan Sex and the City was at its height. Following a reclusive number theorist who built a supercomputer that has allegedly cracked the stock market, a cat-and-mouse chase ensues across Manhattan’s Chinatown between the mathematician and finance bros.
4. The Fountain, 2006
The Fountain features a British actress playing a glowing, ethereal goddess-like figure who bestows an enchanted ring to her hero. It was also 2006, three years after The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Not to say Aronofsky was riding off the coattails of elvish fever and fantasy, but The Fountain sticks out from his body of work all these years later. Nothing has come close. Starring Hugh Jackman in a career-best as Tommy/Tomas/Tom Creo, and Aronofsky’s ex-wife Rachel Weisz as Isabel/Izzi Creo, the film spans centuries in its 96-minute runtime, seeing Jackman’s character searching for the fountain of life to give his dying wife in their different lifetimes.
3. The Wrestler, 2008
Like Brendan Fraser years later, Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler was almost promised a career renaissance. (A blight it is in the media to be labelled as ‘so-and-so is so back’.) If you’re put off by the boxing premise, The Wrestler is less about the sport and more about how Rourke’s Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson can’t seem to pull away from the sport that’s killing him. Obsession and suffering run throughout Aronofsky’s filmography, and The Wrestler is one of his best executions. Only this time, Rourke didn’t win the Best Actor Academy Award that year.
2. Requiem for a Dream, 2000
Requiem for a Dream put Aronofsky on the map. It’s set in the New York nether-neighbourhood of Coney Island, following the lives of three addicts and their ambitions for a better life. Opening with a young Jared Leto playing icon Ellen Burstyn’s son as he hauls off her beloved TV, where she watches her favourite game show, to the pawn shop to buy more drugs. He cooks up get-rich-quick schemes with Marlon Wayans’ character, while his mother is driven mad as she starts a pill addiction and is left waiting by the post-box for her shot on the game show.
1. Black Swan, 2010
The Wrestler and Black Swan were released two years apart, dealing with two disparate worlds of culture, but the two couldn’t be any more different. If you don’t think ballet is a sport, you’d think differently after watching Natalie Portman as the perfectionist and petite Nina Sayers, who finally gets a shot in the spotlight as the Swan Queen. The catch? Her French avant-garde company director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), wants her to play the Black Swan, too.
Nailing the duality of the role, the horror-thriller film’s mastery comes in how Nina comes to understand her paranoia in the different women around her. Her washed ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey) as her future. The neglected prima donna Beth (Winona Ryder) as her near future. And the cool Lily (Mila Kunis) as her mirror image and the ultimate embodiment of the Black Swan.
Black Swan scooped Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing nominations at the 2011 Oscars, while Portman bagged Best Actress. The cameraman at the award show should’ve mic’d up Aronofsky as Portman walked up the steps to accept the golden statuette, as he surely muttered under his breath, in the words of Nina, “I was perfect”.
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