Caught Stealing Review: Darren Aronofsky’s 2025 Thrilling NYC Crime Ride With Austin Butler and Tonic the Cat

Caught Stealing is the latest film from Darren Aronofsky. The setting is New York, far enough back (1998, to be precise) to make it look gritty even by crime-film standards. The hero is an everyman who only wants to tend bar and hang out with his girlfriend. But one seemingly mundane cat-sitting favor is all it will take for them to find themselves on the bad side of some very bad criminals. It sounds pretty by-the-numbers, but trust me: Caught Stealing knows how liable we are to underestimate it, and it can’t wait to upend our expectations.

Genuine Period Grit and Jarring Rawness

I’d better tread lightly to avoid spoiling this one. Steering clear of any plot details, I can say that the first big surprise in Caught Stealing is how much the trailer’s emphasis on dark comedy and badass nonchalance really belies the movie’s uncompromising rawness. Its ’90s New York feels as lived-in as you could ask for, and seamy enough that just watching it makes you feel the need for a tetanus shot.

And this is a story that doesn’t waste any time getting ugly. Just the inciting incident alone – the event that causes our workaday protagonist Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) to begin realizing what he’s gotten into – is downright brutal. The baddies in Caught Stealing don’t believe in asking nicely first, which is certainly not to say that their methods can’t get any worse after Hank’s first run-in with them.

Ingeniously Effective Dark Humor

At the same time, Caught Stealing finds plenty of room for those mordant jokes that were so prominently showcased in its marketing. Here’s the key to why its comedic relief succeeds so well: most of its humorous beats are intertwined with its narrative progression and revelations. The laughs in Caught Stealing don’t depend on mere amusement, but on a kind of amused admiration for the script’s cleverness.

The most crucial storytelling beats – how will Hank discover the movie’s most important plot device? How will he escape this terrible predicament? – are resolved with a brazen ingenuity that riffs on certain staples of lowbrow comedy without feeling cheap. Even a few seemingly throwaway gags are in fact artfully veiled Chekhovian guns.

A Stellar Cast, Sharply-Drawn Characters

In the lead role, Austin Butler strikes a tricky balance, portraying a character who is at once understated, charismatic, and haunted by a certain traumatic event. Hank doesn’t possess any standout smarts or skills, but he has just the right kind of spontaneous instincts to keep himself alive through one dilemma after another without undue help from the screenplay. As for the aforementioned past trauma, I’ll just say that the movie’s inversion of this character-arc trope is quite possibly its boldest twist.

As every good crime thriller must, Caught Stealing also serves up a rich rogues’ gallery. There are a few stock characters here – for instance, the vicious loose cannon (Nikita Kukushkin) and the collected professional (Benito Martínez Ocasio) – but even with these clichéd villains, screenwriter Charlie Huston wisely realizes that their actions are horrible enough for us to want them dead without his making them cartoonishly loathsome.

And, while the two crime honchos – the deeply feared Drucker brothers (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), described in the trailer as “scary monsters” – are worthy of their notoriety, they’re also humanized via an oddly Scorsese-esque passage. (It put me in mind of that sequence from Goodfellas wherein the three guys are interrupted on their mission to bury the body).

The standouts among the rest of the supporting cast are Zoë Kravitz as Hank’s fortuitously paramedic-trained girlfriend (the trailer ingeniously conceals an especially shocking aspect of her role), Regina King as an apparently crime-weary detective, and Matt Smith as the punk-styled next-door cat owner without whom Hank wouldn’t be in this mess. Oh, and it’s no insult to any of these actors to add that the cat, played by one Tonic (Pet Sematary), is nuanced and expressive enough to hold his own among them.

One final note: Stick around for the mid-credits scene, or you’ll miss the most random A-lister cameo of all time.