{"id":101066,"date":"2025-08-27T15:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T15:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/101066\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T15:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T15:11:07","slug":"darren-aronofskys-crime-caper-loosens-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/101066\/","title":{"rendered":"Darren Aronofsky’s crime caper loosens up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early in Caught Stealing, the camera surveys a lively dive bar in New York\u2019s East Village, circa last call. A subtitle labels the year as 1998, though that\u2019s almost unnecessary with a track from Garbage\u2019s Version 2.0 blasting. Hank (Austin Butler) is the bartender trying to coax young drinkers into wrapping things up. But it\u2019s Hank\u2019s boss who draws the immediate connection to a classic film (just a few weeks shy of its 40th anniversary at the time of this film\u2019s release): Martin Scorsese\u2019s After Hours<\/a>. That\u2019s because the bar\u2019s owner is played by an older, grungier Griffin Dunne, sharing the name Paul with the lost yuppie he played in the Scorsese picture. Maybe Paul finally got fed up with that data-entry job and moved downtown for good, embracing 15 years of rough living. But if director Darren Aronofsky intended to make Caught Stealing his own version of Scorsese\u2019s dark-comic overnight odyssey, the scan starts to glitch early on, not least because the movie repeatedly ventures into the daylight.<\/p>\n

Hank isn\u2019t exactly a restless Manhattan go-getter lost in a scary urban jungle. He\u2019s an affable and good-natured (if seemingly underachieving) California-to-NYC transplant, who comes home to an Alphabet City apartment stocked with booze and sometimes graced by the presence of Yvonne (Zo\u00eb Kravitz), the paramedic he\u2019s been seeing. Butler is so likable that it takes a little while to fully register his alcohol dependency, perhaps more emotional than physical; a series of quick, harrowing flashbacks to a moment from his days as a hotshot high school baseball player fill in what, exactly, Hank has come to New York to escape from.<\/p>\n

Aronofsky handles this with a surprisingly light touch, at least compared to the bathos he brought to The Whale<\/a>, the kind of Oscar-winning success<\/a> that can nonetheless inspire some much-needed soul-searching. Like Aronofsky\u2019s previous film, Caught Stealing is another adaptation where the original writer\u2014in this case, novelist Charlie Huston\u2014takes screenplay duties. Also like The Whale, it\u2019s not as style-forward as Aronofsky\u2019s earliest films; quite unlike The Whale, Aronofsky doesn\u2019t appear to be genuflecting at the profundity of the source material. He might even be having a good time.<\/p>\n

For a little while, at least. When some Russian thugs show up at Hank\u2019s building looking for his mohawked neighbor Russ (Matt Smith), who has abruptly jetted home to London to see his dying father, Caught Stealing seems like it\u2019s setting up a crime caper doubling as an unlikely recovery narrative. By sheer wrong-place-wrong-timing, Hank catches a beating so severe that his health is permanently altered, necessitating him giving up alcohol. This isn\u2019t the end of his problems; soon enough, a cop (Regina King), a gangster (Bad Bunny), and a pair of armed Hasidic Jews (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D\u2019Onofrio), among others, all come looking for Russ and\/or Hank in turn, on the hunt for something Russ may have hidden from his criminal associates. Looks like Hank picked the wrong week to quit drinking.<\/p>\n

Primer: The provocations of Darren Aronofsky<\/a>Darren Aronofsky calls AI tools “the new front in the war on meme culture”<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet while the story\u2019s basic set-up jointly recalls After Hours, Coen Brothers-style malicious fates (an errant cat is involved), and maybe a touch of Guy Ritchie\u2019s antics, Caught Stealing\u2019s sometimes-jarring tone keeps readjusting to a grimmer frequency. Scorsese may specialize in anguish, but many of his movies have a pitch-black sense of humor, often impressively integrated into tense and violent material, providing appropriate catharsis, or laughs that catch in your throat. (After Hours, probably the closest he\u2019s ever come to a full-on comedy, may have fewer laugh-out-loud moments than Goodfellas or The Departed.) Caught Stealing does nab the dubious title of \u201cAronofsky\u2019s funniest movie\u201d from the likes of The Wrestler<\/a> or mother!<\/a>; among its highlights is a smash cut to a bar singalong of a very late \u201990s track that\u2019s even funnier when you picture how insanely out of place it would be in any other movie he\u2019s ever directed. So maybe it\u2019s the source novel that dictates a few particularly hellish plot turns, or maybe it\u2019s Aronofsky who has trouble properly setting them up. Regardless, some major pivots designed to raise the stakes have precisely the opposite effect, deflating tension by shellshocking and slowing down Hank\u2019s scrappy ballplayer\u2019s physicality.<\/p>\n

At any speed, though, Butler shines. The man is a movie star, perfect poised to keep pace with Matthew Libatique\u2019s gliding camera, even when Hank runs around with a hitch in his step from a gnarly set of stitches. He and Kravitz may have to engage in a few too many convenient exchanges complaining about Giuliani-era gentrification, but their chemistry is palpable, and so are their differing levels of New Yorkiness, as she playfully ribs his mama\u2019s-boy out-of-towner vibe. The movie doesn\u2019t need to lay Hank\u2019s weaknesses on too thick, because Butler\u2019s angular, haunted face and body language so clearly and casually conveys who this guy is\u2014someone whose closer relationships are held at bay by his suppressed guilt. Aronofsky lays it on thick anyway. The eventual manifestations of Hank\u2019s guilt are bleak enough that Scorsese himself might well wonder if the characters have been punished enough by the halfway mark.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s remarkable, then, how well Caught Stealing holds together as entertainment; as much as Aronofsky seems incapable of the modulation needed to make a crime caper, he\u2019s also a big part of why this particular variation works anyway. At times, the movie resembles the director running through his greatest hits, with its Lower Manhattan setting (like Pi<\/a>, released the year this movie takes place), forays into Brighton Beach (like Requiem For A Dream<\/a>), and athletic lead character felled by the limitations of his abused body (The Wrestler) as well as his addiction issues (Requiem again), despite an obsessive and mother-abetted fixation on his initial field of excellence (Black Swan<\/a>). Only in this version of things, there\u2019s nothing operatic or especially punk-rock going on (despite Russ\u2019s vintage\/outdated guise); with the movie\u2019s combination of grunge and slickness, the late-\u201990s alt-pop on the soundtrack makes some thematic sense.<\/p>\n

Maybe Caught Stealing\u2019s unpleasant tonal jitters do, too. Some part of Aronofsky may want to evoke the darkly funny mishaps of a vintage crime comedy, but something else keeps coaxing him halfway down dark alleyways, before the movie scrambles back into more comic-adjacent urgency. It\u2019s that run-and-stop-short rhythm that makes\u00a0Caught Stealing\u00a0feel more like a fraught, imperfect recovery than a\u00a0Requiem-style spiral into hell, and an unusually balanced New York portrait. The city of Aronofsky\u2019s early career is neither a paradise lost to gentrification nor a metropolis of the damned. It\u2019s just a bustling microcosm of a pitiless world with plenty of places to hide.<\/p>\n

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Charlie Huston
Starring: Austin Butler, Zo\u00eb Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D\u2019Onofrio
Release Date: August 29, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Early in Caught Stealing, the camera surveys a lively dive bar in New York\u2019s East Village, circa last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-101066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}