Caught Stealing movie review (Photo – Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures)
To paraphrase Billy Joel, Hollywood has lately put me in a New York state of mind.
Caught Stealing
Directed by Darren Aronofsky – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
A couple of weeks back, I saw Spike Lee’s Highest to Lowest, which is now followed, after the unfortunate Honey Don’t!, by another New York film: Caught Stealing, starring Austin Butler.
In contrast to the almost rapturous way Highest to Lowest pans around majestic skyscrapers, Caught Stealing opens with its camera trained on the grubby ground—uncollected trash and a homeless man, who ends up a minor cog in the film’s plot. The focus is on bartender Hank Thompson, a once-promising pro baseball player whose life, after a tragic, dream-ending traffic accident, he pointedly calls “garbage.”
Asked to care for a neighbor’s cat, Thompson is, for reasons unknown to him, suddenly set upon by a parade of gangsters demanding money he neither knows about nor has.
While badly beaten, pursued, and fearing for his life, we begin to suspect that the money, mystery, and the men who first pummel and then chase him form an unasked-for kind of shock therapy—jolting him out of the bilge-water level to which his life has sunk. An early scene of him descending into the bar’s basement hints at metaphor.
On the run, Thompson encounters all kinds of characters, including some played by Hollywood actors who may themselves be on the downside of their careers. Yet the supporting cast provides a diverse, if not surreal, backdrop to his cat-and-mouse game with his deadly pursuers. While I wasn’t overly impressed with Butler’s turn as Elvis a few years back, I liked his recent scene as a creepy cultist in Eddington, and he’s good here as a man just trying to stay alive as the body count mounts around him. Regina King, playing a good cop/bad cop role, is good also.
The movie is set in 1998. I don’t know if that’s a reference to Darren Aronofsky’s first film, Pi, a very different movie that came out that year, which I remember seeing at the now-gone Colorado theater. I also don’t know if the references to Men in Black (released in 1997) are deliberate, but I couldn’t help noticing that both films share a critical plot point—which is all I’ll say.
That said, Caught Stealing plays fair with the audience. The protagonist behaves in ways that seemed plausible to me, which helped me buy into the story despite the narrow escapes and missed bullets that come with the genre. It’s an interesting way to kill, bad word, considering the film’s carnage, an hour or two.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regency Academy Cinemas, and LOOK Dine-In Cinemas Downey.
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