IJW: Caught Stealing [2025]

[u/Duncan_Dixon_Coffey]

There’s a lot to love about Darren Aronofsky movies, whether it’s the dark psychology stuff (see Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream) or deep character dramas (see The Wrestler and The Whale). They’re also not what you would call easy viewings. If you’re able to rewatch Requiem, then you’re made of sterner stuff than me because my hand is always going to inch towards the Pixars or the Wes Andersons than an Aronofsky movie.

But Caught Stealing though? Aronofsky has slid into a zone where I didn’t think he ever would: conventional.

This is a slick crime caper that could’ve easily been lifted from the 90s (fitting given its 1998 setting) and is a classic tale of “wrong place, wrong time” involving violent criminals. Given how polarising Aronofsky’s previous two films were (the Jennifer Lawrence-led Mother! and the melodramatic Brendan Fraser drama The Whale), it’s almost like he made Caught Stealing as a way to reassure himself and us that he’s still good at what he does.

Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) was a star baseball prospect in high school, only for a car crash to end his promising career. These days he tends bar on the Lower East Side, drinks way too much, has hot sex with his much-too-understanding and caring girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz, who deserves way better because Yvonne exists only to serve the plot and Hank’s arc), and has recurring nightmares of his career-ending car crash. This is basic ‘traumatised main character’ stuff combined with a large dash of ‘pathetic’, but Butler sells because he’s so damn charismatic and makes Hank much more capable than he reads on the page. Plus he can play drunk as well as the best of them.

Hank’s neighbour and a very unsubtle caricature of a British Punk, Russ (Matt Smith, just chewing scenery every second he’s onscreen), needs to hot foot it back to London (his dad had a stroke, aight?), and leaves his cat in the hands of Hank. As one might expect, Russ is caught up in some deep shit with some bad people, such as a bunch of Russian gangsters led by Colorado (Bad Bunny) and a pair of violent Hasidic brothers Lipa and Shmully Drucker (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio respectively, both just having a blast). Despite getting the cops and Detective Roman (Regina King) involved, they’re no help and Hank is basically forced to get himself out of this clusterfuck of a mess.

Read the rest of my review here as copying all the text here is unwieldy: https://panoramafilmthoughts.substack.com/p/caught-stealing

Thanks!

[u/Lord_Cockatrice]

A Time Lord, 2 Kingpins and a Bad Bunny walk in a bar...