Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

Thank god Darren Aronofsky finally made a movie I can get behind again.

I became an Aronofsky loyalist after The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010), having already caught my attention with Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000). The Fountain (2006), released between those two pairs of great movies, was fine, but not great, indicating that Aronofsky was not quite infallible—but then he seemed to double down on that notion with two genuine duds, mother! (2017), which was so awful it made me angry; and The Whale (2022), which won Brendan Fraser his Best Actor Oscar but was a wildly insensitive story about morbid obesity, played by someone who was not obese (don’t even get me started on the stupid double entendre of the title). The only Darren Aronofsky featurre film I haven’t mentioned here is Noah (2014), the one film of his I never bothered to see because it was such a wild departure, was based on a story in the Bible, and was poorly reviewed to boot.

It does mean, however, that Darren Aronofsky has not quite stayed consistent as a director who has earned my loyalty based on his name alone. For a while there I thought he had that status, along the same lines as the Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodóvar or Christopher Nolan. And then his most recent movies went from not worth seeing to dreadful to barely tolerable, so when the trailers began running for Caught Stealing, I could only be cautiously optimistic at best.

This time, the optimism paid off. The one thing I’ll give Aronofsky credit for when it comes to every one of his movies is that everything he makes is unlike anything else he’s ever made—and yet you can find his sensibility somewhere deep in all of them. Caught Stealing isn’t quite a comedy, but it has several funny moments, making it the closest thing to a comedy he’s ever made. He clearly has both a sense of humor and a soft spot, as evidenced by the almost-incongruously cute animation element of the closing credits.

Caught Stealing is more of a farce, albeit one with plenty of gritty violence in it. My favorite thing about it is the lead character, Hank (Austin Butler, excellent as always), is a regular-guy bartender living in 1998 New York City, and although he gets caught up in extraordinary circumstances, he’s no action hero. After being hospitalized by goons looking for his punk Brit neighbor Russ (a nearly-unrecognizable Matt Smith), Hank freely admits to police Detective Roman (Regina King, in a part that takes one of this movie’s many surprising turns) that he’s really scared. Eventually Hank steps up and does heroic acts, but only when he’s otherwise out of any conventional options, and never with any “alpha male” energy. This is a guy who’s vulnerable, who cries, who gets physically hurt—quite badly.

I won’t be the first to mention the violence in Caught Stealing, the knowledge of which had me going in with the expectation that I may be unsettled by it. The trailers make it look almost comic. It’s certainly startling at times, but very much to the credit of both Aronofsky and script writer Charlie Huston, the violence is only ever in service of the story and the character development.

Almost every character is given more dimension than their screen time would lead you to expect; virtually every actor in this film brings something more to what’s merely written on the page. This is particularly the case with Zoë Kravitz as Yvonne, Hank’s love interest, in spite of getting disappointingly little screen time (for justifiable reason, in terms of plotting); and both Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as Hasidic mafia brothers Lipa and Shmully. There is a brief detour to their mother’s place with Carol Kane that is a delight, but then Carol Kane is always a delight.

The less you know about Caught Stealing going into it, actually, the better. Not all the characters are what they seem, and some of the characters turn out to be what they seem but also helpful in surprising ways. Certain characters that would live to the end in other movies don’t here, and others that you fear for make it out okay. There’s a feeling of randomness to all these characters’ fates, but in a way that’s surprisingly satisfying. Most critically, Caught Stealing is utterly unpredictable, perhaps because people are often utterly predictable.

I will mention there is a cat. Bud the Cat, played by a remarkably chill cat named Tonic, is part of the inciting incident—Russ the neighbor asks Hank to look after Bud when he has to go home to the UK for a family emergency. Russ is tied up with all these criminals, and Hank simply has the bad luck of being in the way when the goons (including one named Colorado, played by Bad Bunny) come looking for him. Other key plot elements include the kitty litter, a fake plastic poop, and a literal key.

Caught Stealing even features character development between Hank and Bud the Cat, which is the sweetest part of the movie, even though I have a hard time believing a cat would just chill inside his open carrier whether he happens to be between a driver and an airbag, or on the beach at Coney Island. Regardless, I’m a big fan of Bud the Cat, and also a big fan of Caught Stealing.

Overall: B+