Review: Caught Stealing (2025)

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It’s a bit surprising that Darren Aronofsky would struggle with controlling tone in a film, considering his movies, such as Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Black Swan (2010), are usually so consistent in terms of tonal and aesthetic presentation, sometimes overwhelmingly so. But Caught Stealing is an outlier in his filmography. With a great cast led by Austin Butler and a fun concept about a former baseball player getting caught up in gangster feuds over stolen money, Caught Stealing is fittingly entertaining, but it ultimately flounders. Aronofsky cannot decide whether it’s a Coens-esque whacky crime caper, a New York late night odyssey a la Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), a genre-bending black comedy like you’d get from a Korean auteur such as Bong Joon-ho, or one of his own pitch black thrillers. 

What Caught Stealing is not is a comedy, since few of the jokes in the film land, or when they do, they sit at odds with the grisly violence and tragic events bracketing them. Admittedly, few filmmakers can balance the deadly serious and the hilariously absurd as well as the Coen Brothers, but Aronofsky is a bit too dour to strike the necessary balance to make us laugh despite the evil actions on display.

Much of this is likely a result of the script by Charlie Huston, adapting from their own novel. So much of the structure and dialogue feels obviously literary—the witty repartees of the various gangsters, the plot that continually circles back to the same locations and characters to gradually reveal more information, the traumatic backstory for the lead character that is only clarified over time. These elements would work well on a page, but they don’t lend naturally to the film unless you have an easier tone, like you get in most Elmore Leonard adaptations, such as Get Shorty (1995) or the TV adaptation Justified. At the same time, the presentation is still vintage Aronofsky, with a gritty vision of New York City circa 1998 and Matthew Libatique’s stylish if visually dark cinematography. So when characters are goofing around after someone has had their head blown off, it doesn’t gel.

At least the performances are good. Butler proves he’s more than capable of being a charismatic leading man even if he’s not playing a real life icon like Elvis. In Caught Stealing, Butler’s Hank works as a bartender on the Lower East Side and gets pulled into a dispute when his British punk neighbour, Russ (Matt Smith), leaves his cat in Hank’s care so he can visit his ailing father in London. The problem is that Russ is in some deep trouble; Hank realizes this when two Russian gangsters show up demanding access to Russ’s apartment. Hank tells them to piss off only for them to kick his guts in, resulting in him landing in the hospital and losing a kidney. Eventually, Russ’s problems spiral even further, pulling in a Puerto Rican gangster (Benito Martinez Ocasio a.k.a. Bad Bunny), a grisled homicide detective (Regina King), and two Hasidic mobsters (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio). This all spells bad news for Hank and his casual girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), who are caught in the crossfire.

You can tell from this description of an ordinary Joe pulled into one bad deal after another, with ever more outlandish characters coming out of the woodwork of a seedy New York, that there’s supposed to be a lightness to the tone, despite the violence, but that’s not what we get in Caught Stealing. Rather, the film is grim, even occasionally horrifying. Take the aforementioned moment where Hank is beaten so badly that his kidney ruptures and he wakes up in the hospital with a massive scar and a missing organ. It’s played for some black comic laughs, but the severity of the violence isn’t funny, especially as Hank is continually nursing a disgusting wound throughout the rest of the film. And it gets worse from there, with truly upsetting violence meted out on characters unlucky enough to exist in Hank’s orbit. Bad things happen in Elmore Leonard adaptations or Coen Brothers films, but you genuinely laugh when Brad Pitt gets his head blown off in Burn After Reading, for instance. Here, there are no laughs from the violence, just a deep well of sadness for the characters and what they have to suffer.

Admittedly, there are fun moments throughout. A chase through the back alleys of New York, where Hank ducks into kitchens and apartments in order to flee the Hasidic gangsters, demonstrates Aronofsky’s visual flair and momentum that serves him so well in movies such as Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.

Perhaps I’ve become too inured to violence of the sort found here to respond to a film like this properly, but it’s more likely that the material could have been better shaped for the big screen and better adjusted for Aronofsky’s strengths as a filmmaker. Not every filmmaker is capable of managing tone like a Korean master, and even Bong Joon-ho occasionally fails to do so (as we saw with Mickey 17 earlier this year). If Caught Stealing fails to provide the sort of black comedy it so obviously tries for, it’s at least engaging throughout. It is more a miscalculation than a bad film outright.

5 out of 10

Caught Stealing (2025, USA)

Directed by Darren Aronofsky; written by Charlie Huston, based on their novel; starring Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Benito Martinez Ocasio, Griffin Dunne, Carol Kane.

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