150 Word Review: 'Caught Stealing' (2025)
And she did it, just like that
Director Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing is a grimy love letter to the same era in which Aronofsky made his indie feature debut, Pi, in 1998. This darkly comic crime caper wants to be violent, quirky pulp fiction, but the movie falls short of its ambitions. It is neither consistently clever nor hardboiled, and one ugly plot twist sours the madcap vibe.
Based on a novel by Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing is at its most sentimental, recreating graffiti-covered, pre-9/11 downtown New York City. The cast is a homerun: impossibly beautiful Austin Butler is likable as our hero, a cornfed bartender/former baseball player. Zoë Kravitz can do cool girlfriend in her sleep. Liev Shrieber and Vincent D'Onofrio are legitimately funny and unrecognizable as a pair of Hasidic gangsters. Regina King brings an unpredictable edge.
The giant Unisphere in Flushing Meadows, Queens, gets a well-deserved shout-out, too (the best since Men in Black).
I've said it before and I'll say it again: give Schreiber and D'Onofrio their own film.
I enjoyed it (aside from that plot twist you mentioned, presuming we're thinking of the same one), but I gotta say, my favorite part was the cat.
I feel like movies like this, while they might "star" a guy like Austin Butler (who, to his credit, gives great "huh?"), are really vehicles for an army of character actors to do their thing. I appreciated seeing theatre weirdo and acquaintance George Abud as the hapless dude across the hall, Tony winner Will Brill as the homeless guy, and of course National Goddamn Treasure Carol Kane. All that was missing was an appearance by Richard Kind.