From left: 'Requiem for a Dream,' 'mother!' and 'The Whale' Artisan Entertainment/Courtesy Everett Collection; Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection; A24/Courtesy Everett Collection In the year 2000, there were so many hip filmmakers making sexy violent experimental crime fantasias. Darren Aronofsky stood out. Most Sundance debuts were cheap, but his breakout feature looked funded by quarters stolen from a broken vending machine. When other young directors were trying hyper-kinetic editing, he all-but-trademarked the rapidfire split-second montage: heroin, lighter, bubbles, syringe, molecules, eyeball, STONED. Rather than join the long line of provocateurs battling the MPAA over NC-17 ratings, Aronofsky just released his second film unrated - a totemic act of Generation X defiance. And while plenty of awesome movies back then were about drugs, an Aronofsky picture somehow just was a drug: intoxicating, traumatizing, addictive, corrosive. Twenty-five years ago, the release of Requiem for a Dream cemented his status as a hallucinatory new-millennium visionary. After a quagmire period spent developing and re-developing his hyper-personal cosmic romance, he returned to prominence with a grody wrestling weepie and a lurid ballet horror show. Then he got into global warming. He remains our defining poet of the cinematic extreme, embedding mytho-religious undertones inside visceral cockroach overtones, vortexing his beautiful, doomed protagonists toward symphonic self-mutilation. As Requiem for a Dream celebrates a quarter-century of emotional mayhem, it's time to embark on an epic journey across time to rank his filmography. Don't expect too many happy endings. In Aronofsky's universe, God exists and doesn't care. The Whale (2022) Image Credit: A24/Courtesy Everett Collection The most watchable movie ever made about a 600-pound-man dying for a week, this A24 arthouse hit gave Brendan Fraser a comeback Oscar and marked Aronofsky's independent-film return after a decade spent burning Hollywood cash on eco-fables. Fraser's depressed teacher Charlie barely leaves his couch, committing slow-motion suicide-by-pizza while loved ones swing through his apartment for sad convos. Some people think The Whale hates overweight people. Allow me to begin this list by wondering if Aronofsky kinda hates everybody - and loves what he hates about us. He films Charlie's girth with cruel leviathan awe and turns the ensemble into a parade of grotesques. Charlie's estranged daughter is an internet-youth gorgon. The eager missionary is a homophobic liar. Hong Chau's nurse enables Charlie as an act of ruinous love, issuing dire heart-failure warnings as she hands him another chicken bucket. Adapted from screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter's play, The Whale is speech-y and stagebound, lacking the director's usual rollick. But it's not here at the bottom because of all the mawkish squalid excess. The problem is the other squalors are more fun. Caught Stealing (2025) Image Credit: Sony Pictures/Everett Collection Must admit I've been worried about Darren Aronofsky for a while now. Beyond The Whale's Oscar-bait showboating, his other recent projects were smelling like desperation. He produced a couple Disney+ celebrity vanity projects, went to the dystopian Vegas megadome, sold part of his soul to Google. Perhaps we ought to embrace new technologies like spheroid mega-cameras and [deep sigh] generative AI. Maybe he scratched some intense itch sending Will Smith to the bottom of the ocean and forcing Chris Hemsworth to role-play death. Then again, maybe it's a midlife crisis or a flat-out artistic calamity: two decades of renegade style optimized into semi-parodic Brand Aronofsky for fame-powered corporate collabs. So it's notable that this caper attempts to go back to basics. Twenty-seven years after π, here's another paranoid thriller set in '90s Lower Manhattan. Austin Butler's bartender Hank pinballs between outrageous underworld types: Britpunk, bad cop, Orthodox hitmen, Russian baldies, Bad Bunny as a kingpin, After Hours' Griffin Dunne as a living symbol of pre-Giuliani downtown entropy. In a weird way, it's the first normal Aronofsky movie, insofar as the whole New York Chaos Quest subgenre already gave us some Safdie spectacles, a couple John Wicks and Anora. You feel the director, an aging enfant terrible, trying to outdo those upstart sensations for sheer filth. The first time Hank gets into a fight, he winds up pissing blood and losing a kidney. Then someone pulls staples out of his stomach. The trailer promised sizzle between Butler and Zoë Kravitz, but things get brutal fast. Sheer body-count hideousness makes this a solid watch for nutcases. Scrape off the outer layer of vomit gore, though, and you're left with a pretty straightforward Find the Thing potboiler. Try not to get depressed by this career trajectory. In the actual 1998 of π, characters believed enlightenment was possible. In Caught Stealing's cynical re-enactment,