The hunt for the kidnapper, who turns out to be an up-and-coming rapper called Yung Felon (played by the up-and-comer ASAP Rocky), takes Washington\u2019s David King all over the city, through packed subway cars and parade-clogged streets, and Lee happily follows him, all the way to an apartment numbered A24\u2014Highest 2 Lowest\u2019s theatrical distributor, and a sign that Lee has returned to his independent roots. The movie is too loose and too leisurely to play as the thriller it\u2019s meant to; it\u2019s a stroll through the old neighborhood, not a race against time. But that\u2019s mainly because it overflows with the director\u2019s love for the city he has always called home. For the movie\u2019s Cannes premiere, he dressed up, head to toe, in Knicks colors, right down to a pair of blue-framed eyeglasses with orange rims. The only question was whether he had them made for the occasion or already owned a pair.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n \n Dana Stevens <\/a><\/p>\n Darren Aronofsky is also Brooklyn born and raised, and his latest movie, Caught Stealing, is also a ticking-clock thriller that doubles as a paean to New York City. And like Lee\u2019s movie, Aronofsky\u2019s is styled as a return to his roots. The story of a down-and-out bartender (Austin Butler) who gets caught up in a deadly battle between Russian and Hasidic mobsters, the movie hurtles from the Lower East Side to Chinatown (where Aronofsky\u2019s Pi was set) to Brighton Beach (where his follow-up, 2000\u2019s Requiem for a Dream, takes place) to Flushing Meadows, taking in weddings and Shabbat dinners as it goes. But this isn\u2019t the gentrified, tourist-friendly Manhattan of the present day. The movie, which is based on a novel of the same name by Charlie Huston, is set in the late 1990s, when recently reelected Mayor Rudy Giuliani was waging war on broken windows and the degradation of Times Square. In the movie\u2019s first scene, Butler\u2019s Hank pours a round of free shots for a group of college students in order to stop them from dancing in the back of his bar, lest they fall afoul of Giuliani\u2019s attempt to subdue the city\u2019s nightlife by using an arcane law<\/a> to fine any establishment without a license allowing more than three people to move to music at once.<\/p>\n That\u2019s about the last time Hank is able to stop anyone, or anything, from moving. When his mohawked neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), goes out of town, Hank agrees to watch his cat for a few days. The task doesn\u2019t thrill him, and he can barely take care of himself in the first place, but it does seem to make a favorable impression on his girlfriend Yvonne (Zo\u00eb Kravitz), who\u2019s beginning to wonder if their relationship is ever going to start to get serious. But when Hank comes across a pair of Russian gangsters (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin) knocking on his neighbor\u2019s door, they beat him so savagely he loses a kidney, and soon he\u2019s running from both them and two ruthless Hasids (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D\u2019Onofrio) who seem to be after the same mysterious thing as the Russians.<\/p>\n Netflix\u2019s Star-Studded New Movie Adapts a Beloved Mystery Novel. It Butchers It. Most TV Shows Get This Major Plot Point Totally Wrong. This New Netflix Series Nailed It. She\u2019s One of Our Most Popular Novelists. But There\u2019s a Consistent Problem With Her Books. What Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s Critics Misunderstand About Her As a high school baseball star whose career was derailed by a tragic car accident, Butler has the easy lope of a Northern California jock, and the vulnerable sincerity of a man who still calls his mother every day to discuss how the Giants are doing this season. But just as Hank is stuck mourning what might have been, Aronofsky has made a movie that\u2019s resolutely mired in the past. It doesn\u2019t seem accidental that he set his story in 1998, when Pi was released. It\u2019s as if he\u2019s looking back on the last time he could move through the world without being noticed, when he could close down the bars at 4\u00a0a.m. and wake up to a messy apartment and a swig of cold beer. It\u2019s nostalgic for a time when Manhattan still had some grottiness left to clean up, but it also frames that seedy, dangerous time as a period you\u2019re meant to pass through to get to something better, not a place anyone would want to stay.<\/p>\n Caught Stealing is a lot less messy and self-indulgent than Highest 2 Lowest. Aronofsky has his characters stroll by the old Kim\u2019s Video marquee; Lee would have set an entire scene inside the store and lingered on a shot of his favorite rentals. But that efficiency comes at a cost. There\u2019s nothing as exuberant as the moment Lee pauses his movie for a performance by the late salsa legend Eddie Palmieri, or breaks the fourth wall to let Red Sox fans know just what he thinks of them. Aronofsky\u2019s New York is preserved behind glass, but Lee\u2019s feels very much alive.<\/p>\n Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do you make movies about a world you no longer live in? As artists grow older and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":185414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,1144,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,21074,24209,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-185413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-comedy","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-city","12":"tag-newyork","13":"tag-newyorkcity","14":"tag-ny","15":"tag-nyc","16":"tag-spike-lee","17":"tag-thrillers","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115113819141384807","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185413","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=185413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/b888352a-2a5e-4a04-a0f8-842964f44e62.jpeg\")
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\n Spike Lee and Denzel Washington\u2019s Thrilling New Movie Reimagines a Classic
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