Caught Stealing Is an Entertaining Late August Trifle from Darren Aronofsky

The late August five-star three-star movie is a time-honored tradition. After all, you’re not always in the mood to watch a masterpiece. Sure, sometimes you want to watch Kurosawa, Ozu or Herzog. Sometimes, however, when your energy is running low and the desired vibe is more low-key, you want something that’s going to satisfy you, but won’t require too much brainpower to process. You want Premium Rush. You want Fright Night. You want Red Eye. You want a movie like Caught Stealing.

Caught Stealing is a five-star three-star movie in a number of ways, not least of which is the dual presence of Darren Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique behind the camera. The stacked cast in front of said camera includes stars Austin Butler, Matt Smith, Zoe Kravitz and a fluffy cat named Tonic, who acts circles around all of them. The murderer’s row of supporting performers includes Bad Bunny, Regina King, Carol Kane, Liev Schrieber, Vincent D’Onofrio and Griffin Dunne. The soundtrack features UK punk darlings Idles performing covers, original songs and the Rob Simonsen-composed score. All of it adds up to a better movie than it needs to be, but one that’s (somewhat frustratingly) less than what it could be at the same time.

Butler plays our affable hero, Hank Thompson, a former baseball player and current bartender/functional alcoholic living in New York in 1998. When Hank’s punk rocker neighbor Russ (Smith) has to return to London for a family emergency, he charges Hank with caring for his cat. Hank’s girlfriend Yvonne (Kravitz) sees it as an opportunity for the responsibility-averse Hank to step up. None of them expect the criminal underworld reckoning that comes knocking at Hank’s door seeking Russ, the money guy for several gangland factions. With Russ not around, it falls to Hank to keep everyone happy; not an easy thing to do when everyone’s waving a gun around and threatening to kill everyone you’ve ever loved.

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Butler lends a shaggy, straightforward charm to Hank that makes him instantly likeable, despite his character making a lot of bad choices. If this movie came out in 2002, this role could have been played by Josh Hartnett. Kravitz, embodying the same mature cool that her mom Lisa Bonet exuded in High Fidelity, is perfectly cast as Yvonne, who’s both fun-loving and impressively practical when it comes to putting up with Hank’s antics (or drawing a boundary). The movie could do with a lot more of her. The same goes for Smith, who chews up the scenery with aplomb and injects bright, chaotic energy into every scene he’s in.

Caught Stealing is enamored with ’90s New York, from its subway tile titles to gratuitous inserts of iconic businesses like Kim’s Video to the frequent conversations about how much everyone hates the raging gentrification ushered in by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani. The theme of a disappearing New York and, obviously, the presence of Dunne, inevitably bring to mind Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Like Caught Stealing, that 1985 film was obsessed with the bizarre characters, hyper-specific subcultures and neighborhoods that were on the verge of disappearing. And, like Caught Stealing, it also seemed out of sync with much of its director’s dark, decidedly un-quirky repertoire.

Aronofsky does manage to squeeze a little of himself in here — for instance, Hank’s apartment building resembles the one from Aronofsky’s debut film Pi, released the same year Caught Stealing is set in — but there’s only so much room for him to stretch. Screenwriter Charlie Huston, adapting his 2004 novel, provides a solid pulpy story with some genuine surprises, but not much depth. The ways in which Caught Stealing could be a more substantial, thematically complex outing are readily apparent, and you can almost feel the movie straining to be just a little smarter, a little more character-driven than it is.

The result is a movie that’s very fun, but weirdly unambitious for Aronofsky. If any up-and-coming director made this movie, it’d be seen as a promising breakthrough. For the guy known for Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, Mother! and The Whale, it feels like he’s slumming a bit. In a way, though, it’s refreshing to see an Aronofsky movie that, for once, isn’t bursting with more ideas than it can reasonably contain. It would still be nice in this instance to have a thematic through-line that wasn’t just based in nostalgia for a bygone New York. It’s doubtful Caught Stealing will make the same impression its director’s other films have. Fortunately, though, its rewatchability factor is just as high.

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Charlie Huston
Stars: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, Benito A Martínez Ocasio, Carol Kane
Release date: Aug. 29, 2025

Abby Olcese is an entertainment writer based in Kansas City. Her work has appeared at /Film, rogerebert.com, Crooked Marquee, Sojourners Magazine, and Think Christian. You can follow her adventures and pop culture obsessions at @abbyolcese.