Production designers are the new superstars of the cinema; or, at least, they should be since so many mediocre American movies in recent years have been lifted to near-greatness by their sets and general ambience. Darren Aronofsky’s newest film veers off the well-worn path he’s beaten for himself as a director. Caught Stealing is a conventional crime comedy-of-errors that’s mostly elevated by its 90s NYC mise-en-scene courtesy of Mark Friedberg and a self-deprecating performance from Austin Butler as a former high school baseball star who loses out on a chance to go pro and now tends bar in the West Village. But the back story isn’t really so important since the movie has an irresistible forward momentum that just keeps accelerating, something Aronofsky is already famous for. The script by Charlie Huston, based on his own novel, relies on a lot of violence and threats of violence to get its plot points across, and while the development isn’t predictable it rarely rises above the usual. But it delivers style in spades.

The story launches late one night when Hank Thompson’s (Butler) wannabe punk-rocker neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), asks Hank to cat-sit for him while he’s back in England for a few days to attend to a “family emergency.” However, as soon as Russ is gone, some gangsters show up looking for Russ and the money he owes them. Believing Hank knows where he is they put the squeeze on him. Hank manages to lose an actual kidney in the process, but that isn’t the end of his troubles. Even Russ’s cat, Bud, doesn’t really take to Hank and continually bites him. Aronofsky manages to distinguish each subsequent encounter in Hank’s misbegotten Odyssey across Downtown NYC by giving his persecutors vivid identifying qualities—two of the guys are Orthodox Jews (played by Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber, no less), and another pair has thick Eastern European accents. As despicable as these people are they are played for laughs, as is the cynical female cop (Regina King) who is investigating Hank’s situation. 

As Aronofsky showed so vividly in his last movie, The Whale, he can put his protagonists through a physical as well as emotional wringer, and Butler, for all the joshing that goes on around Hank, really does look like the constant punishment is taking a toll on him as an actor, and not just Hank as a character. So Aronofsky obviously gets what he wants—a violent crime comedy that looks as if it were filmed during the time period it depicts—but you may find the experience of watching it less amusing than he intended. 

A lot of Korean crime movies are comedic by default, and Hwang Byeong-guk’s Yadang is no exception, though in the beginning you may not appreciate the laughs because of the way Hwang frames the action. The word “yadang” means “snitch,” and is used to describe Lee Kang-su (Kang Ha-neul), who is a self-styled professional snitch, though it took a while for me to understand exactly how he came to embody this lowly term. In actuality, Kang-su is a kind of liaison between people arrested for drug crimes and the police. He gets the former to give up names of associates and dealers to the latter and somehow profits mightily from this service, though exactly how isn’t made clear. So technically he’s really a “snitch facilitator,” but I’ll take the movie’s terminology at face value. However, the pacing and would-be whip-smart dialogue are so frantic it takes a good 30 minutes to get a handle on the plot.

I would assume Korean viewers have less trouble understanding the mechanics of the story, since it involves knowing how Korean prosecutors work. For all intents and purposes Kang-su works for Deputy Chief Prosecutor Koo Gwan-hee (Yoo Hae-jin), who, naturally, is gunning for the chief prosecutor job and uses Kang-su to steal high profile drug cases away from the police, in particular a captain named Oh Sang-jae (Park Hae-joon), who gets mightily pissed off when Kang-su and then Koo swoop in to arrest the principals of a bust that Oh had laboriously set up with the help of a cooperative meth junkie who also happens to be an up-and-coming starlet (Chae Won-bin). Making an enemy of Oh turns out to be not wise for Koo, but when Koo decides to use a particularly nasty drug dealer who owes him a favor to get Oh off his back, Kang-su gets swept up in the betrayal. The second half of this very brutal movie is mostly concerned with Kang-su, Oh, and the starlet teaming up to get revenge on Koo and his criminal minions.

Kang’s performance as Kang-su sets the overall mood: He’s flashy and hyper-active, whether he’s cajoling drug-addled snitches or going cold turkey himself, and thus provides high contrast with Yoo, who shunts aside his usual goofy comedic persona for something intense and sinister. Eventually, the muddled aspects of the first half congeal comprehensively in the second, but we’ve seen this kind of revenge plot a hundred times before, and no amount of gotcha table-turning can make it fresh.

Caught Stealing opens Jan. 9 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Yadang, in Korean, opens Jan. 9 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).

Caught Stealing home page in Japanese

Yadang home page in Japanese

Caught Stealling photo (c) 2025 CTMG

Yadang photo (c) 2025 Plus M Entertainment and Hive Media Corp.