Caught Stealing

Caught Stealing is a propulsive crime thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky, adapting Charlie Huston's 2004 cult novel, with Huston himself writing the screenplay. A change of pace for the director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, it trades his usual psychological anguish for a violent, blackly comic New York crime caper, and gives Austin Butler one of his most purely charismatic roles to date.

Set in the grimy, pre-gentrification New York of 1998, the film follows Hank Thompson (Butler), a washed-up former high-school baseball star turned East Village bartender whose life implodes when he agrees to look after his punk neighbor's cat. The favor drags him into a brutal turf war between Russian mobsters, Hasidic gangsters, and crooked cops, all convinced he is sitting on something they want. Zoe Kravitz plays his girlfriend, with Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, and the musician Bad Bunny filling out a sprawling ensemble of hustlers and heavies.

Reviews praised the film's kinetic energy, its needle-drop evocation of late-'90s Manhattan, and Butler's committed everyman performance, even as some judged it a minor entry in Aronofsky's filmography. A modest performer in theaters, it found a far larger audience on streaming, where it climbed the charts as a slick, adrenalized crowd-pleaser. Caught Stealing is streaming on Netflix.