Overview:
Austin Butler delivers a career-defining performance in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing (2025), a darkly funny, high-energy crime thriller that mixes brutal consequences with breezy momentum.
Austin Butler is the real deal. That is the major takeaway from every starring or supporting role he’s had since appearing in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and his latest is here to show a more charming side than ever before. Caught Stealing is directed by Darren Aronofsky and stars Butler as Hank Thompson, a former baseball prodigy who is haunted by his past and incidentally swept into a frenzied criminal conspiracy over a missing bag of money. Dark, relentless, funny, and well-performed by every cast member, Caught Stealing is a throwback crime thriller that swings and hits more often than not and a stark departure for its director.
Aronofsky is the name behind Requiem For a Dream and a few other films that rank among the most merciless American movies to hit the mainstream in the 21st century. He is not a populist by any means, which is what makes Caught Stealing such a left turn. Here, Aronofsky picks a star who has been rising swiftly since his smash-hit lead performance in Elvis and places him at the center of a breezy crime thriller. From the trailer alone, the pace seemed like a totally new direction for Aronofsky, and the film in full only confirmed that. Shedding the psychological terror of past films like Black Swan, Caught Stealing doesn’t leave you with a whole lot of baggage. Longtime fans of Aronofsky’s darker endeavors might see it as selling out, but this is exactly the kind of lean, mean, down-the-middle, adult movie that audiences used to get a dozen of a year.
Butler continues to prove his place as one of the most exciting stars to emerge in the 2020s. Not only does he deliver with every performance, from leading a musical biopic to stealing the show as an incredible villain in Dune: Part Two, but he also consistently picks projects that show his range and are helmed by directors with a distinctive vision. As Hank, Butler is more gentle and reserved than ever; a character backed into a series of corners, in over his head, and pushed to the point where he must fight for what little is left of his life. The world around Hank is violent and bizarre, embellished by appearances from Bad Bunny, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, and Vincent D’Onofrio, all playing different flavors of flashy, memorable criminal figures in New York City’s underworld. Hank’s rock is Zoë Kravitz as Yvonne. Butler and Kravitz have great chemistry, but Caught Stealing loses sight of what to do with Kravitz’ character, and this is the one point where the film struggles to connect.
The relationship between Hank and Yvonne is central to an exceedingly dark turning point in Hank’s chaotic spiral into a world of crime. The movie breezes past this turning point so fast that it takes a while for the weight of it to catch up with the rest of the story. While the final stretch of the movie resolves all of this nicely, Caught Stealing just barely overcomes the sour feeling left by how this particular moment plays out earlier in the film.
But the bleak quality, which is no doubt familiar to Aronofsky, is part of what works about this film. Every blow feels consequential. Hank is put through hell, all over a misunderstanding and a case of wrong-place, wrong-time that he was unfortunate to find himself in. He loses nearly everything, and the movie does not play any of it particularly lightly. It is the greatest strength of how this film is written that it can be so dark while also maintaining such a propulsive energy and a genuinely funny streak at times. Caught Stealing is a raw, pure, genre-movie thrill ride with a lot to love and a lead performance from Butler that proves his ascent is not stopping anytime soon.
8 out of 10
Caught Stealing is in theaters now.