Editor

Andrew Weisblum

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky · 2008

Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 drama follows Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, an ageing professional wrestler clinging to identity through performance as his body fails and his relationships fray. Shot on 16mm by Maryse Alberti and scored by Clint Mansell, it stars Mickey Rourke in a physically exacting performance that revitalised his career. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice and received critical acclaim for its restraint, realism, and unsentimental treatment of ageing, labour, and obsolescence.

13:00

Mother!

Darren Aronofsky · 2017

Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is a psychological horror film structured as a closed-loop parable: a woman’s domestic peace unravels under successive invasions, culminating in annihilation and cyclical rebirth. Shot in tight proximity to Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, scored with near-total silence, and driven by escalating symbolic violation, it functions less as story than as sustained sensory provocation. Its themes—ecological violation, artistic narcissism, theological recursion—are delivered without irony or ambiguity. Critical reception was divided: many admired its formal rigour and intensity; others found its allegory reductive and its relentlessness exhausting. It grossed $44.5m on a $30m budget.

13:00

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky · 2010

Nina Sayers, a disciplined but fragile dancer at a New York ballet company, wins the lead in Swan Lake and starts losing her grip on reality as she competes with a looser, more sensual rival for the role's darker half. Aronofsky built the film from a decade-old idea about doppelgängers and understudies, shot it on a $13 million budget with Matthew Libatique's camera pressed close to Portman's face, and had his lead actors train in ballet for months before a single scene was filmed.

13:00

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson · 2009

George Clooney voices a fox whose one last heist against three farmers turns into a siege on his whole underground community. Wes Anderson's 2009 stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl keeps the plot but reshapes the tone into something drier and more personal.