{"id":173169,"date":"2025-08-25T02:01:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T02:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/173169\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T02:01:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T02:01:12","slug":"austin-butler-in-action-crime-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/173169\/","title":{"rendered":"Austin Butler In Action Crime Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt has been exactly 40 years since Martin Scorsese dazzled us with a wild, untethered journey through the underbelly of NYC in the course of a single night in 1985\u2019s After Hours. Thus it is no accident, and certainly a form of homage by director Darren Aronofsky<\/a> to include that film\u2019s star, Griffin Dunne, in a small supporting role in his latest, the East Village-set Caught Stealing<\/a>, a surprisingly entertaining, almost lightly commercial movie from the filmmaker behind the likes of Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, The Whale, Black Swan, mother!, among other heavy dark dramas that have defined his career. Everyone needs a chance to loosen up and have some fun, and even though this is also quite dark in places, definitely violent, this one is end-of-summer relief from the real world Aronofsky often inhabits.<\/p>\n

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\n\tCredit his star, Austin Butler<\/a> for delivering a likable mess of a guy named Hank Thompson who loves his mother and shows a wonderfully humane side for this kind of crime-laden action film by also putting the welfare of a Maine Coon named Bud ahead of his own, even as his life is continually threatened after he innocently agrees to look after the pet cat of his next-door neighbor. That guy is a Mohawked Idles-loving punk rock emigrant from England who, as it turns out, is bad news for Hank. Russ (an unrecognizable Matt Smith<\/a>) apparently has any number of bad guys after him in search of some sort of key that unlocks something very desirable to all of them, who Hank, now unwittingly caught up in all of this, encounters due to his kind-hearted agreement to look after Bud.<\/p>\n

\n\tHank is a guy just getting by, a bartender whose life and ambition to play baseball was altered years earlier when, driving drunk, he rammed his car into a tree, killing another player and severely injuring his knee and ending his dream. Now, with the help of EMT girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz<\/a>), he is trying to stay sober and embark on a relationship that looks to be very good for both. But, along with Puerto Rican compatriot Colorado (Benito Mart\u00ednez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny<\/a>), when two Russian mob thugs invade Russ\u2019s pad in search of him and the key, they encounter Hank, beating him nearly to kidney failure and landing him in the hospital. After this encounter he is aware he is in over his head, especially when finding the key buried in a squeaky poop toy in Bud\u2019s litter box. A relapse into drinking also doesn\u2019t go well, landing him in the company of savvy police detective Elise Roman (Regina King<\/a>), who is hot on the trail of the drug money hidden by Russ and warns of imminent danger from much more lethal players including the notorious Orthodox Jewish brothers Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully (Vincent D\u2019Onofrio). Along this nightmarish journey, several people wind up dead, Russ returns also demanding the key, and Hank, with Bud at his side, goes further down the rabbit hole.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tBased on the 1998 novel written by Charlie Huston, who also writes the screenplay set in that same year, Caught Stealing allows Aronofsky to point his and DP Matthew Libatique\u2019s cameras into all the corners of a city he knows so well, expanding into numerous other locations including Russian-heavy Brighton Beach, and an especially well-shot and edited chase sequence (by editor Andrew Weisbaum) at Shea Stadium. For Butler, this is a movie star-affirming role after character turns as Elvis and in Dune. His screen presence is magnetic, and we really care for the guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve, but also carries the action skills to be credible enough to just simply stay alive with half of New York\u2019s criminal underground seemingly in pursuit. A dogged King and a compassionate Kravitz lend fine support as do all the bad guys in ways you might expect, or not in the case of Schreiber and D\u2019Onofrio who take us into the heart of deeply Orthodox Judaism in an amusing plot detour in the film\u2019s final third (Carol Kane even briefly shows up at a big wedding sequence as their mother). But it is scene-stealer Tonic as Bud, and his, uh, budding bonding with Hank that wins our hearts. Fortunately, even though there is some injury to the cat implied, Aronofsky does not show it, which is a smart move since I have a cat identical to this one and Weezie would have been horrified. Thank you on behalf of all animal lovers for softening what was more brutally described in the book. However, (SPOILER ALERT) <\/strong>there is a happy ending for Bud.<\/p>\n

\n\tShout out also to production designer Mark Friedberg\u2019s work, which really captures the era and look of the East Village circa the late \u201990s and adds immensely to the authentic feel of time and place. Producers are Jeremy Dawson, Dylan Golden, Ari Handel and Aronofsky.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: <\/strong>Caught Stealing
Distributor: <\/strong>Sony Pictures
Release Date: <\/strong>August 29, 2025
Director: <\/strong>Darren Aronofsky
Screenplay: <\/strong>Charlie Huston
Cast: <\/strong>Austin Butler, Regina King, Zo\u00eb Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D\u2019Onofrio, Benito Mart\u00ednez Ocasio, Griffin Dunne, Carol Kane, Nikita Kukuahkin, Yuri Kolokolnikov.
Rating: <\/strong>R
Running Time: <\/strong>1 hour and 47 minutes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has been exactly 40 years since Martin Scorsese dazzled us with a wild, untethered journey through the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":173170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[8759,71844,98669,75679,96073,171,75680,53,98137,67,132,68,54197],"class_list":{"0":"post-173169","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-austin-butler","9":"tag-bad-bunny","10":"tag-benito-martinez-ocasio","11":"tag-caught-stealing","12":"tag-darren-aronofsky","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-matt-smith","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-regina-king","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-zoe-kravitz"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115086942818382975","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}