Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | December 1, 2025
As a righting of the ship after his disastrous and inexplicably lauded The Whale—we all love Brendan Fraser and we’re all glad he’s working again but that’s an Oscar win that felt curdled even before his name was announced—Darren Aronofsky’s atypically comic crime-caper Caught Stealing does what it should and needs to do. It cleanses the palette. It’s nimble and quick and just nasty enough, without any (well without much, let’s say that) of the leaden dourness that the Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan filmmaker had allowed to seize control of his recent work. One doubts this will end up being anyone’s favorite Aronofsky film when the dust settles on his career, but it’s an eccentric spin in the right direction. Best of all, it allows him to show off some easy breezy movie muscles that we’ve never seen him flex before. It’s nice to see surprises up the sleeves of those we thought we knew so well.
The year is 1998 and the city is New York—a committed cinephile will be well aware that this is the exact same time and place where and when the real-world Aronofsky was off filming Pi, his lo-fi breakthrough about mathematics and high-contrast paranoia. Which in itself underlines how Caught Stealing feels like the start of a new cycle for the filmmaker. I don’t know that you could say he’s exactly closing a circle here, since the harsh black-and-white experimentalism of Pi is several universes away from the Soderbergh-esque style and surface pleasures that Aronofsky’s indulging in here. Perhaps Max, the hallucinating mathematician at the center of that earlier film, could work his way through the quantum entanglements that lead from the former to the latter, but I’m just a movie critic, and sir, this is a Wendy’s.
So here Austin Butler plays Hank Thompson, a former baseball prodigy who dropped the ball right before his big break and so now finds himself slinging margaritas at a sleazy Alphabet City gin-joint—one seemingly built as much out of graffiti and band stickers as it is piss-stained concrete. If the yellow cabs and flip-phones don’t make it clear to you it’s ‘98 NYC, just wait til you hear the ace of-the-moment playlist the bar be rocking. (Opening up your movie with Garbage’s “I Think I’m Paranoid” is a very quick way to open up my heart, it must be said.)
The setting for Caught Stealing needs to be mentioned and mentioned again, though, because it really feels as if priority number one for Aronofsky was this methodical recreation of it—this is some Robert Eggers-level painstakingly intricate kinda duplication going on. You get the feeling Aronofsky and his production designer pored over two-decade-old period photographs of the East Village and Brighton Beach the same way that Eggers learns dead languages.
Indeed, one gets the feeling that the director flung himself so enthusiastically into that aspect of the movie because his more out there and caustic impulses weren’t being entirely fed by Caught Stealing’s simple and straightforward seen-it-before story, which—quirks aside—is all pretty rote when it comes down to it.
When we meet him, Hank seems—save some haunting nightmares that will become thematic echoes as we speed along—generally pretty satisfied with his lifestyle of getting drunk every night and dating a period-appropriate Pixie Dream Girl named Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz, who drums up real heat with Butler). Unfortunately, having already achieved a goal that most straight men would aspire to, Hank finds himself ripped into one of Hitchcock’s wrong-man plots thanks to his mohawked-up punk-rock neighbor Russ (Matt Smith). A seemingly simple request of cat-sitting quickly turns into anything but—before you know it, Russian gangsters are beating Hank’s kidney to a yucky pulp and he’s on the run for knowing too much. Or not knowing enough. Even Hank doesn’t seem quite sure what he knows and what he doesn’t, but that might just be because everybody keeps punching him in the head.
When Pi dropped in 1998, it was notable for what a wild outlier it represented at the time, which was littered with Tarantino knock-offs a la 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag and Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead. (Man, movies used to have movie titles!) So it’s pretty funny that Caught Stealing feels as if it would’ve fit right in alongside those flicks—it’s as if we’ve entered an alternate timeline of what Aronofsky could’ve been serving all this time.
Well, in this one respect, I prefer the timeline we got. Honestly give me a million mother!s to this. But then in its favor Caught Stealing did remind me of Doug Liman’s 1999 masterpiece Go more than it did the aforementioned forgettables. And that probably comes down to both movies stuffing every grungy corner with a game cast of actors serving up one or two scene capital-C Characters. Smith and Kravitz are the least of it—just wait until Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio show up as machine-gun-toting Hasidim. With Carol Kane as their sweet little mameleh! Of course, as a person who considers After Hours to be my favorite Scorsese film, my personal pick for most killer cast member is contractually obligated to be Griffin Dunne playing a downtown bar-owner named Paul.
It’s not as if Caught Stealing isn’t without plenty of Aronofsky-isms, though; one shouldn’t make the case that all of his beloved harshness has been sanded off for the absolute most mainstream appeal here. Dirty toilets overflow, puke flies at the screen—the violence in this hits hard (oh my god that head-butt) and unapologetically. There’s a legitimately shocking murder that happens halfway through the movie that I felt kinda dumb for not seeing coming in retrospect, but it still got me. It’s just there are also a lot of cat reaction shots that are plopped down alongside that. Which no doubt sounds like heaven itself to many, but like Hank, I gotta admit—I’m a dog person. So gimme more surgery staples being pulled out in excruciating close-up and less meowing, please!
