Here's a fun game to play: which director maximizes the ratio of "quality of feature film directorial debut" to "quality of the rest of their feature film oeuvre"?
I think Darren Aronofsky is the one to beat here. Pi is quite good; it's got just enough science fiction to feel exciting and superreal, but it's otherwise quite restrained. His work as a whole[1] is just the opposite: unsubtle and excessive, even masturbatory, lunging at deep questions but lacking anywhere near the kind of emotional or artistic maturity to actually address them.
But Aronofsky can't be the only one who fell off a cliff after a great debut. Who else is in the running here?
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It's not all awful. Black Swan is entirely fine. But then mother! is a slap in the face to women and film as a medium, so it kind of balances out. ↩︎