SYNOPSIS: In “Caught Stealing,” a new dark comedy from director Darren Aronofsky, and now playing in theatres, Austin Butler plays Hank, a bartender whose life is turned upside down when he agrees to look after his neighbor’s cat. Drawn into the soft underbelly of 1990s era New York City, Hank finds himself fighting for his life (and the cat’s well-being) at the hands of various gangsters who believe he has something they want. “These guys you’re messed up with,” says Detective Roman (Regina King), “they’re scary monsters.”
CAST: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, Bad Bunny, Carol Kane. Directed by Darren Aronofsky.
REVIEW: “Caught Stealing” is a departure for director Darren Aronofsky. His movies have essayed everything from addiction and apocalypses to isolation and psychological turmoil, and while many of them, like “Black Swan,” “The Wrestler,” “The Whale,” and “Requiem for a Dream,” have been critical and commercial hits, they haven’t been what you would call crowd-pleasers.
His latest film, “Caught Stealing,” starring Austin Butler as a bartender who gets drawn into the criminal underworld of Giuliani-era New York, however, is a crowd-pleaser, but only in the most Aronofsky-esque of ways.
A violent, dark comedy that plays like a cross between Guy Ritchie’s quirky criminal dramas and the Kafkaesque absurdity of “After Hours,” “Caught Stealing” is an adrenalized, twisty trip typical of the genre, but seen through Aronofsky’s edgy lens.
Hank, the charming bartender played by Butler, is not your genre typical everyman who gets in over his head. Aronofsky and screenwriter Charlie Huston, who adapted his own 2004 novel, give Hank layers. He’s a wild child who dances on pool tables and greets the day with a Miller Light. Tormented by nightmares of an alcohol fueled accident that took the life of his best friend, he repeatedly wakes up in a sweat. As his situation spirals out of control his survival is driven by a mix of fear and desperation.
So, he’s the hero, but in true Aronofsky fashion, he’s a morally ambiguous one whose quest for survival comes with a high body count and a trail of destruction. He may not be as relatable as “After Hours’” Paul Hackett, played by Griffin Dunne, who makes an appearance here as coke snorting dive bar owner Paul, but the charismatic Butler keeps him compelling with a combo of vulnerability and steeliness.
Aronofsky populates the rest of the story with a variety of colorful characters, like observant-but-deadly Jewish mobsters Lipa and Shmully (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), a throwback punk rocker (Matt Smith), gangster Colorado (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny) and no-nonsense cop Elise Roman (Regina King), but this is Butler’s show.
“Caught Stealing” has the character complexity of an Aronofsky film, but it’s way more fun than he usually has on screen.
In the annals of the lore of the American West the names of Black cowboys like Nat Love and Rufus Buck don’t loom as large as Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp. A new movie, “The Harder They Fall,” starring Jonathan Majors and Idris Elba, and now playing in theatres, aims to change that.
“While the events of this story are fictional,” reads an opening title card, “These. People. Existed.”
In real life Nat Love (Majors), Rufus Buck (Elba), Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi), Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield), Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler) never crossed paths, but writer, director Jeymes Samuel imagines a revenge story that brings them all together in wild and increasingly violent ways.
The film’s story is put into motion when Love, as a child, sees Buck kill his parents. To finish off the heinous act, they let the youngster live, but carve a cross into his forehead.
Cut to years later. It’s the late 1800s and Love is now an outlaw, and gang leader. He’s a kind of Robin Hood who only robs people who rob banks. When he and his gang steal $25,000 Buck planned on using to fund a town for Black Americans, it puts the two men (and their gangs) on a bloody collision course.
As the final showdown between the hunter and the hunted nears, the film flips back-and-forth between the two groups, introducing the characters and, of course, gun fights, bank robberies, and bar fights.
Remember when you first saw “Reservoir Dogs” and it felt like you had entered a parallel universe? It felt familiar, yet new and exciting. That movie was a reimagination of what a gangster movie could be, and the first forty-minutes or so of “The Harder They Fall” gave me the same rush. It plays with many of the same elements we expect from a revenge style Western, but it feels fresh and daring. The cutting and pasting of styles, from classic Hollywood and bloody b-movies to the anachronistic dialogue and music and charismatic cast, it’s an exciting eyeful. Director Jeymes Samuel has reinvigorated the genre by telling the story through a Black lens, with plenty of stylised spaghetti western action and humour.
The rest of the film is a bit of a mixed bag. The story telling bogs down slightly in the middle leading up to the final shoot out, which has a body count that would make Tarantino proud. Keeping things interesting are the cast.
Cherokee Bill played by Stanfield, has a long scene on a train that makes you wish there could be an entire movie about this character alone. Stanfield’s laid back take on the stone cold killer who claims to abhor violence, but is quick on the trigger, is worth the price of admission alone.
Danielle Deadwyler as the androgynous Cuffee also warrants further exploration. A loyal sharp shooter, they get the job done, but there is a great deal of humanity tucked away under their thousand-yard stare.
At the center of it all is “Lovecraft County’s” Majors. He’s the engine that fuels the action, and it is his story that provides the emotional undercurrent beneath the bloodshed.
There are no actual heroes anywhere here, just interesting actors inhabiting outsized characters.
“The Harder They Fall” is a crowd pleaser that mixes and matches real life with fiction, tradition with innovation and does so with blood splattered panache.
We’ll never know exactly what was said between Cassius Clay, Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, soul singer Sam Cooke, and football superstar Jim Brown behind closed doors in a Miami hotel room on February 25, 1964, but a new film by Oscar winner Regina King in her directorial debut, offers up a fascinating what-if scenario.
Going into the boxing ring on that night against heavy weight champion Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay (Halifax-born Eli Goree), who had not yet officially changed his name to Muhammad Ali, was a 7-to-1 underdog. When the fight was over Clay was the youngest boxer to ever grab a title from a reigning heavyweight champion.
Helping him celebrate the landmark win are his three closest friends, mentor Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), hit maker Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and athlete Brown (Aldis Hodge). Convened at their Miami hotel on the warm February night, the foursome, all at turning points in their lives, share their thoughts, get heated, debate about how to end segregation, all with an eye toward the future.
That two of them would be murdered within the next year adds poignancy to an already charged conversation.
Cooke and Brown mull over career choices. A discussion of Cooke’s slick but conventional pop songs led to the writing and recording of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” one of the greatest anthems of the Civil Rights Movement. Brown, already a superstar on the football field, comes under fire for appearing in a movie Western called “Rio Conchos,” as a minor character, killed off early in the action.
Clay is celebratory, but plotting his next moves, both professionally and personally as he decides when to announce his conversion to Islam and his name change to Muhammad Ali.
The firestarter is X, the public figure under surveillance by the FBI, who encourages his friends to take a more militant stand, to use their celebrity and standing in a more meaningful way. He is the discontent, an activist who predicts hard times ahead.
“One Night in Miami” began life as a stage play by “Star Trek: Discovery” staff writer Kemp Powers, who also penned the movie’s script. As such, there’s a theatrical feel to King’s staging of the scenes, most of which take place in the hotel room. She has opened up the play, adding new locations and a series of vignettes at the beginning of the film, but this isn’t about action, it’s about the verbal fireworks of Powers’ script and authoritative performances.
It’s a snapshot of the cultural importance of this quartet; a history lesson made even more potent in the era of Black Lives Matter. “Power,” says Clay, “is a world where it’s safe to be ourselves.”
Based on a well-loved James Baldwin novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk” is a story of love in the face of injustice. Director Barry Jenkins, in his follow-up to the Oscar winning “Moonlight,” has crafted a stately film that takes us inside the relationship at the heart of the story and the heartlessness that threatens to rip it apart.
Childhood friends “Tish” Rivers (Kiki Layne) and Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James) kept their relationship platonic until it blossomed into love when she was 19 and he was 22. With a lifetime of familiarity behind them, their relationship progresses quickly. They move into together and wait for the birth of their first child when tragedy strikes. Framed for sexual assault by racist cop Officer Bell (Ed Skrein) Fonny is thrown in jail. “I hope nobody ever has to look at somebody they love through class,” Tish says. The families rally to raise money for his defence but circumstance conspires to keep him incarcerated.
“If Beale Street Could Talk” is a love story framed against a backdrop of disenfranchisement and turmoil. It is about a woman’s love for her fiancé, a mother and father‘s for their daughter, the power of love to be the fuel of survival. As the faces of this love Jenkins displays an impeccable eye for casting. Through their body language and easy chemistry Layne and James hand in performances ripe with empathy, power and, here’s that word again, love.
There is a delicacy to the filmmaking. Jenkins takes his time, slowly building the story of heartbreak tinged with hope. It’s a period piece but placed alongside the spate of newspaper stories of young African-American men by police it feels as timely as today’s headlines.
