Caught Stealing (2025) review

Aronofsky tries to make, of all things, a Guy Ritchie-type movie: former baseball prospect Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), who was severely injured in a car crash that not only ruined his career (and his leg) but killed his good friend, works as a bartender in NYC - with lovely paramedic Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) as his love interest - and is asked by his English next door neighbor Russ Miner (Matt Smith, channeling Sid Vicious) to take care of his cat while he visits his dying father back home, except Russ is a drug dealer and his enemies, the Russian Mafia and Hasidic Jews, pummel the pine tar out of Hank.  This is a rather pedestrian piece of genre fiction (novelist Charlie Huston adapted his own book to the screen) and Hank isn't a captivating lead figure - no offense to Butler, but he's not the most "emotionally flexible" of actors, either - so it's up to the side characters (and cinematographer Matthew Libatique's roving camera) to add some flair, and it isn't until Jewish assassins Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and his brother Shmully (Vincent D'Onofrio) appear that it truly perks up.  Considering the diversity of his filmography to date, Aronofsky doesn't seem to want to be 'trapped' in the arthouse box, although this bit of pre-9/11 "nostalgia" fails to actually challenge him.