'Caught Stealing' Is My Absolute Favorite Type of Thing

A New York City Coen Bros-meets-Scorsese crime comedy couldn't be any more my shit

Sep 04, 2025

My reflection is Austin Butler. *Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures; Hannah Roman*

Crime comedies are probably my favorite genre. Even if they’re imperfect, like Caught Stealing is, I love them. Even though its pace is too back-loaded, Caught Stealing is perfect to me, because it has the things that I prize in a movie: colorful characters, satisfying twists and payoffs, a distinctive setting, charismatic performances, noir themes, and plenty of kiss kiss bang bang. As a bonus, it even has a beautiful cat.

Austin Butler is Hank, a bartender on the Lower East Side in 1998. (I’m still hoping for an adaptation someday of Richard Price’s Lush Life, the ultimate gentrifying LES crime story.) He was a high school baseball phenom who planned on being drafted by his beloved San Francisco Giants, but a car accident that destroyed his knee and killed his friend derailed his future. So now he’s in a place where he never has to drive, wallowing in bitterness and alcohol. The lone bright spot in his life is his girlfriend Yvonne, played by Zoe Kravitz. On paper, Yvonne is a thankless character, but Kravitz’s chemistry with Butler — in combination with the character development Yvonne does get — elevates the character in a way that makes the movie better than it would be otherwise.

One day, Hank’s British punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith, so fun) tells Hank he’s going back to London for a while and he needs him to take care of his cat, Bud. Bud is played by Tonic the cat, who previously played Church the undead Maine coon in the Pet Sematary remake, which is like the Lord Macbeth of cat actor roles. Russ is a drug dealer who’s involved in some very shady stuff, and when two Russian thugs come looking for him and find Hank instead, the former phenom finds himself pulled into a dangerous struggle to stay alive as various representatives of New York’s criminal underworld, including Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as Hasidic drug kingpins, try to get Russ’s cash stash from him.

Shoutout to Queens *Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures*

Caught Stealing is a crime comedy in the vein of Fargo, the most perfect version of this type of thing, a story where everyone dies trying to get a little bit of money. It marries Coen style with a heavy After Hours influence (shoutout to Griffin Dunne, whose presence in Caught Stealing is basically an Easter egg). It’s funny that this Coens-Scorsese mashup comes from Darren Aronofsky, who has such a distinctive style of his own. He doesn’t do his usual thing at all here. Sometimes I love Aronofsky’s hysterical freakouts (Black Swan, mother!) and sometimes I hate them (Requiem for a Dream, The Whale), but they’re always recognizably his. But Caught Stealing is so different, a straight genre exercise with none of his usual religious themes and/or grotesquerie. Who knew he had something like this in him?

Austin Butler is becoming my favorite male movie star my age. If Glen Powell is trying to be Tom Cruise, Butler is trying to be Brad Pitt, doing weird voices and picking cool scripts. It’s funny that he’s working with Aronofsky now, because he should have won Best Actor for Elvis, not Brendan Fraser for The Whale, because The Whale is an awful, ugly movie. Butler won’t win an Oscar for this, but he will someday. He’s making me want to get a San Francisco Giants hat, but I would feel too self-conscious wearing it.

I’ve been saving this image I found for years, waiting for any opportunity to use it. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

I reviewed The Paper, Peacock’s new The Office sequel series, for TV Guide.

It's impossible to make The Office again. Social mores about how edgy mainstream comedy can be have changed. The particular alchemy of that cast cannot be replicated. The shift from 20-plus-episode broadcast seasons that are produced as they're airing to shorter streaming seasons that are produced in advance means comedies don't have the same ability to adjust on the fly or the time to find what works, which is what enabled The Office and its sibling show, Parks and Recreation, to find their identities. And the mockumentary comedy that premiered in 2005 is still so popular that it almost feels current, such that a new incarnation will be in direct competition with the original for viewers. Why would an Office fan watch something that's trying to be like The Office when they can just watch the real thing?
For all these reasons, The Paper, The Office's spin-off sequel that premieres Sept. 4 on Peacock, is set up to fail, so the fact that it isn't a complete failure is a minor miracle. It's a funny and pleasant show that's enjoyable to watch. But everything about it is not quite The Office. It's a spin-off that's trying to rebuild the structure of The Office without its tools. It's not even trying to be as good, just similar. If Office fans keep their expectations low, they may be satisfied. It's like a chef opening a restaurant where they serve a version of their signature dish with inferior ingredients. The chef and the patrons know it's not as good, but as long as they both accept the arrangement, everyone can be happy enough — but it's still a less-good version of something they enjoyed before.