For Fans of Darren Aronofsky

Aronofsky has said the four characters in Requiem for a Dream are each addicted to something different: heroin, television, approval, love. That framing matters. The film uses narcotics as a structural device to dramatise what obsession does to the body and mind, regardless of the substance. Clint Mansell's score, looped and accelerating across the runtime, does half the heavy lifting. You don't watch this film; it happens to you.

It is easy to read Black Swan as a horror film and miss how exactly it maps Nina's artistic perfectionism onto psychological collapse. Every compositional choice (the handheld camera that never gives her personal space, the mirror gags that compound across the runtime, Natalie Portman's physical commitment) is load-bearing. Aronofsky is not making a metaphor for ambition; he is showing ambition from the inside, where the line between transformation and destruction was never clear to begin with.

After the formal extremity of The Fountain, Aronofsky stripped everything back and made something close to a character study. Mickey Rourke's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson is Aronofsky's most sympathetic protagonist: a man who destroys himself in a sport that destroys everyone, who keeps returning because the ring is the only place he feels real. The film does not comment on that. It respects it. That restraint is harder to pull off than any of his formal tricks.

Aronofsky spent years developing The Fountain as a studio epic, lost the financing when Brad Pitt dropped out, and rebuilt it at a fraction of the budget using macro photography of chemical reactions for the space sequences. What survived is genuinely strange: three timelines, a thesis about love and mortality that it refuses to explain, and a score by Clint Mansell with Kronos Quartet that may be the best music ever made for one of his films. The people who love it, love it completely.