Film Review: Caught Stealing (2025)

Caught Stealing follows washed-up baseball player Hank (played with gritty charm by Austin Butler) as he’s dragged into the criminal underbelly of 1990s New York. What starts off with a favour, looking after a friend’s cat, quickly spirals into chaos. That friend, Russ (a wildly unhinged Matt Smith), is clearly bad news, and the trouble that follows Hank is anything but minor.

This might be Darren Aronofsky’s lightest film in tone, but don’t expect a comedy. The trailer sells it as a crime caper with laughs - something in the Tarantino or Coen Brothers mould - but within 15 minutes, the film takes a sharp turn into much darker territory. There’s humour, yes, but it’s the bleak kind that fades fast under the weight of the film’s tension and violence. There are no surreal dream sequences like Black Swan, but there’s still that signature Aronofsky grit and you can feel his fingerprints all over the tight camerawork, street-level menace and emotionally frayed characters. This might be his way of saying 'I can do crime thrillers too.'

Austin Butler’s Hank is no show pony. He’s bruised, broken, often flat on the floor, literally and figuratively. He’s a man whose best days are far behind him, stumbling through life with no direction, occasionally getting knocked down and often struggling to get back up. He’s lost more than just a career. But there’s something tragic and compelling about him, something human. And when he shares the screen with Zoe Kravitz, who plays his paramedic girlfriend Yvonne, the film gains real weight. Their chemistry is excellent and her character becomes both Hank’s conscience and the mirror to his failure. It’s a shame we don’t get more of her.

Aronofsky doesn’t seem interested in moralising or digging too deep into metaphor this time. There’s no big message here, no twist that turns the film inside out. Instead, Caught Stealing is content to be exactly what it is: a character-driven, stylish, violent crime thriller with emotional weight and just the right amount of chaos, more like The Wrestler than Requiem for a Dream.

This is Aronofsky experimenting and it works. It may not linger in your mind like Mother!, but it proves he can stretch his talents across genres without losing his edge.

Is it worth the ticket price? Absolutely. Come for the cat. Stay for the chaos.