Darren Aronofsky is a masterclass in miserable cinema, and after The Whale, his next project Caught Stealing. The movie is set to be a period piece set in the Manhattan East Village in the 90s, and here’s our first look at the stars Austin Butler, Zoe Kravitz, Matt Smith, and more.
Check it:
First look at Darren Aronofsky’s ‘CAUGHT STEALING’
• Starring Austin Butler, Matt Smith, Zoë Kravitz, Bad Bunny & Regina King
• Follows a former ballplayer who gets caught in a criminal scheme when pet-sitting his punk rock neighbor’s cat
(Source: https://t.co/m5wN0YsFIE) pic.twitter.com/PTa1HaTQzL
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) April 29, 2025
Other cast members in the film include Regina King, Carol Kane, and two of Marvel’s Kingpins Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio who are playing orthodox brothers who are ‘badass motherf*ckers’.
The movie is based on the book from Charlie Huston of the same name which follows Hank Thompson (Butler), a former basketball star who is now trying to make ends meet in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He gets hired to take care of a cat by his punk friend (Matt Smith), but soon gets mistaken for his friend by the mob who is looking for some missing mob money.
Aronofsky talks about the movie to Vanity Fair, “There are lots of weird characters and lots of weird sub-stories going on. But I think it’s very much a crime caper… I tried to make a genre film with the best actors in the world, with the best crew in the world, and bring it to life with the kind of energy that I felt in ’98.”
The novel came out in 2004 and was set in the year 2000, but for the movie, Aronofsky decided to pull it further back into the late 90s.
Admittedly, I’m more used to Aronofsky’s movies being very depressing character studies, but this looks to be a thriller film that may or may not have those elements of misery that are signature to Aronofsky’s work. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Watch out for Caught Stealing when it hits theaters on Aug.29.
