‘CAUGHT STEALING’ An Over-the-Plate Crime Saga from Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky has had an interesting career thus far. After an auspicious beginning with his intriguing and minimalist debut Pi, the sadistic cult classic Requiem for a Dream, and the ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful sci-fi opus The Fountain, Aronofsky became a legitimate force with The Wrestler and Black Swan, both of which were serious awards contenders with huge audience appeal. Throughout his first decade working in film, he cemented himself as a performer’s dream director, guiding many of his stars to career-best work and a bundle of Oscars. Noah and mother! spelled out a new religious-themed ambitious streak, both divided audiences and failed to make much of a splash at the box office, despite their big swings. The Whale won Brendan Fraser a deserved Oscar but, performance championing aside, felt like a strange departure for the once-auteur with many calling it misery porn (which certainly wouldn’t be new territory). With Caught Stealing, a straightforward crime saga that plays like a Lower East Side Guy Ritchie knock-off, I am not entirely sure where the formal ambition and auteurist vision that once defined Aronofsky has gone but it seems we are yet again in unchartered territory. And not always in a good way.

That is not to say Caught Stealing is without pleasures. The film penned by Charlie Huston is an enjoyable little late summer diversion, just surprisingly down the middle and lacking most (if not all?) of the hallmarks we associate with Aronofsky’s work: psychological torment, obsession with perfection, the body put through hell in the name of transcendence, and familial implosions. And towering performances. Instead, this plays like airport paperback crime fiction. A guy stumbles into something dangerous, very bad people come after him, and things escalate quickly. There’s drugs and guns and people die and it all wraps up in a tidy-enough bow.

On that level, it works. As merely a late-summer theater trip, it checks enough boxes to make this worth the price of admission, even though it would play perfectly fine at home. But as an Aronofsky film, from a director I once respected and genuinely looked forward to each of his films, it feels like a bit of a deflating comedown. Or an indication that the guy is just no longer swinging for the fences.

One thing he has always been consistent at is coaxing career-best performances out of his actors, whether that be Ellen Burstyn and Natalie Portman, or Damon Wayans and Mickey Rourke. There’s not a notable performer that Aronofsky hasn’t challenged to be better than ever before and though Austin Butler is certainly enjoyable here, flashing that easy superstar charisma that has rocketed him into overnight fame, the role is too straightforward and too safe to really enter that next-level conversation. He is good, don’t get me wrong, but the film lacks the kind of raw excavation of a soul that once made the performances that Aronofsky drew out so essential.

Butler plays Hank, a once-promising baseball prospect whose career collapsed after a rookie mistake that left him with a shattered knee and a wonky future. By the late nineties, he is tending bar in the Lower East Side, nursing regrets and maintaining a steamy fling with paramedic Yvonne, played with sexy verve by Zoë Kravitz. Their chemistry gives the film an early jolt of heat that sadly fades once the plot machinery takes over, that element missing more and more as the plot soldiers on.

When Hank agrees to cat-sit for his mohawk-sporting punk-rock neighbor Russ (Matt Smith), he fumbles his way into a waking nightmare involving explosively violent Russian gangsters, a trigger-happy gunman played by Bad Bunny, Hasidic mobsters led by Liev Schreiber, and a narcotics detective (Regina King) who suspects he knows more than he’s letting on. From here, the movie barrels forward at breakneck speed and rarely pauses to sit with the collateral damage, even as the body count rises and rises to absurdist levels. Aronofsky does manage to carve out a few quiet moments of reflection in Butler’s nervy performance, but the film ultimately favors surface-level thrills over deeper exploration. In effect, Caught Stealing is a serviceable crime thriller, though hardly a revelatory one or even one you’ll likely even remember when recalling what came out in 2025.

Is it mostly entertaining in the moment? Absolutely. Is it a must-see? Certainly not. After a fairly confusing recent career trajectory, I would personally rather have seen Aronofsky return to more challenging material here than a surface-level genre thriller – even if Caught Stealing does work well enough for the most part. What feels perhaps most new here for the filmmaker is the introduction of comedy, since there are probably more intentional laughs here than in the rest of Aronofsky’s entire filmography combined. He has always allowed his characters flashes of absurd humanity and tragicomedy, but this film leans on scripted and physical comedy beats in a way that his previous efforts never have, many of which land surprisingly well. A magical cat (watch out, he bites!) doesn’t hurt to elevate the comedy and pathos alike. That’s not to say that the director who wrote the “ass to ass” line is suddenly some master of comic timing, but he proves plenty capable enough to draw genuine laughs.

Even so, I cannot imagine wanting him to linger in this particular lane. The film is the definition of fine and many will probably enjoy it quite a bit for the many things it does right but it does not carry the signature style and deep thematic flavors that once made Aronofsky an essential director of this century and such an exciting talent to watch. Caught Stealing feels like a minor work but also perhaps an admitted regression, away from the major leagues, into something more workmanlike and bush league. It is not that he is cheating his audience with works like this so much as it feel like he is no longer swinging for the fences, and maybe pulling punches is just as bad as getting caught stealing.

CONCLUSION: An easy-to-consume crime thriller with a swaggering Austin Butler in the lead, Caught Stealing abandons the deeper themes and close attention to performance that have defined Darren Aronofsky’s best work. What it delivers instead is one of his most straightforward, surface-level movies – fun but forgettable.