CAUGHT STEALING movie poster | ©2025 Sony

Rating: R
Stars: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Griffin Dunne, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Benito Martinez Ocasio, Nikita Kukushkin, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Carol Kane
Writer: Charlie Huston, based on his novel
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures
Release Date: August 29, 2025

Opening super-titles on CAUGHT STEALING inform us that it’s 1998, we’re on New York’s Lower East Side and it’s 4 AM.

This means we’re just in time to watch twentysomething bartender Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) demonstrate deft social skills as he clears the rowdy crowd out of the dive where he works. Hank then heads back to his small but nice enough apartment to spend the night with not-live-in girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz).

Hank had an extremely promising future in baseball when he was in high school, and he still wakes up in panic from nightmares about how it ended.

Hank’s English punk-rocker neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) announces that his father back in London has had a stroke. Russ insists on stashing his cat Bud, and the Bud’s accessories, with Hank. Hank insists he hates cats, but Yvonne talks him into accepting the furry new roommate.

Bud is adorable, but it turns that that the beastie is not all that Russ left with Hank. Soon enough, several different sets of mob folks show up, demanding that Hank turn over what Russ took. Since Hank has no idea what the item may be, much less where it is, he gets worked over a lot.

Eventually, Hank winds up in gang-vs.-gang straits, trying desperately to find some path forward that will allow him to survive.

While Quentin Tarantino started out by running all the crime movies he’d seen through his idiosyncratic storytelling style – meaning he had predecessors, which are really what’s being referenced – CAUGHT STEALING has a plot that these days is known as Tarantino-esque.

Screenwriter Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel, wisely doesn’t try to go for Tarantino-esque dialogue (which generally doesn’t work unless the writer in question is actually Tarantino), but it’s all intelligent enough and moves smoothly, with some clever twists.

Director Darren Aronofsky employs some arty camera angles that occasionally comment on the action but more often just jazz things up visually, giving familiar kinds of sequences a new look. His pacing is brisk and his staging of frequent violence is impactful.

Butler, who in reality is from California, is excellent as a California transplant in NYC, initially breezy but progressively more introspective and remorseful as events unfold. Regina King is appropriately tough and wry as the NYPD detective trying to find out what’s happening.

Smith looks to be having a blast as the disruptive Russ, though the more we get to know his character, the less likely it seems that others would accept doing business with him. Kravitz is fine in the supportive love interest role.

Other pros, including Griffin Dunne, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Benito Martinez Ocasio (aka Bad Bunny), and Carol Kane all are wholly on target in their performances. Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov hit the right intimidating/comic notes as enforcers. Tonic as Bud the Cat is awesome; kudos to trainers Kaitlyn Purchase, Courtney Voth, and Kelly Whitlock.

The title is a mystery, as while individuals are observed committing a wide variety of crimes, nobody is ever caught stealing.

It’s hard to tell if one running narrative strand is anti-Semitic or just an attempt at quirkiness put forth at an unfortunate moment in real-world history. There are some questions about other groups as well, but those get into spoiler territory.

CAUGHT STEALING doesn’t appear to be trying to deliver any messages, other than that ‘90s-era crime thrillers in this vein are cool and deserve to have examples of their genre increase. It makes this point admirably enough.

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