gemko

Caught Stealing (2025, Darren Aronofsky)

Added 2025-12-03 14:49:30 +0000 UTC

62/100

Was After Hours mentioned in the press kit or something? I see virtually no resemblance outside of both being set in lower Manhattan (it’s not even the same neighborhood, East Village rather than SoHo; I lived on 11th St. between B and C almost exactly when this film takes place*, felt very nostalgic) and featuring Griffin Dunne as a guy named Paul. Oh, and I guess there’s a mohawk. Still, it’s got much more in common, structurally if not tonally, with something like North by Northwest: average dude (first time I’ve found Butler genuinely appealing) inadvertently gets mixed up with homicidal criminals and callous (or worse) cops, runs for his life, eventually must fight back. (The hero’s mother also figures prominently in both, I just now realized.) Setup’s great fun—can’t recall offhand a finer means of roping our hero in, by which I mean the kitty and its accoutrement—and while a key supporting character’s violent death initially seems to break some unstated contract about what kind of movie this is, I wound up accepting the admittedly partial gearshift. Half-assed bullshit (I still have no idea how we got from Hank trapped in Paul’s office to Hank walking around free; there’s a truly lame instance of someone helping out his intended victim by announcing “I’m about to kill you” instead of just doing it) thankfully gets counterbalanced by intermittent cleverness, e.g. the potential escape method (when Hank’s zip-tied to the steering wheel) that was casually planted much earlier on…and then doesn’t work, he has to find another means. Very nice. Schreiber and D’Onofrio as Hasidic hit men has a Things to Do in Denver vibe (he said without ever having seen it), but we’re sufficiently distant from that rough moment in cinema history that such quirkiness didn’t grate as much as I’d have expected had I known in advance. Whole thing’s kinda beneath Aronofsky ambition-wise, but I mostly had a good time with it. Not as good a time as Teddy Blanks had designing the end credits, though.

* It’s set in 1998, and I moved from 11th St. to pre-gentrified Bushwick on 7 February ’98.