Monday new releases: 1 September 2025

People often (some­times … occa­sion­ally) ask me when we are talk­ing about a film, “What’s it about?” In the case of Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, the imme­di­ate answer would be: it’s about Hank (Austin Butler), a former base­ball con­tender turned New York bar­man and alco­hol­ic who is dragged in to a mob war over miss­ing drug money when his neigh­bour asks him to look after his cat for a few days.

Then they some­times (occa­sion­ally … actu­ally nev­er) say to me, “No, what’s it really about?” That’s a ques­tion I ask myself, because it’s the job of a crit­ic to think about these things, but when I turned my atten­tion to the “what it’s really about” of Caught Stealing, I came up empty handed.

Is it about nos­tal­gia for a pre‑9/11 New York, full of friendly dive bars, salt-of-the-earth vag­rants and skody-but-affordable apart­ments? Maybe, a little. Is it about try­ing to live up to a mor­al code in a ruth­less world? Not really, even though two of the most mon­strous vil­lains are Orthodox Jews (Liev Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio) who worry about cor­rectly observing Shabbat while car­ry­ing semi-automatic weapons and grenades.

Is it about how the only reli­able rela­tion­ship a young man has is with his moth­er? Or his cat? Or is that even­tu­ally you have get over your­self and grow up (except that Hank’s even­tu­al emo­tion­al growth appears to be uncon­nec­ted with the excess­ive trauma he is put through)?. And, trust me, it is excess­ive. I’m not sure why the viol­ence should be so extreme, but Aronofsky is unable to pre­vent ‘fun’ action — that would be more in line with the whacky char­ac­ters and attemp­ted banter — from turn­ing into sheer nastiness.

Caught Stealing is also about base­ball — a wasted tal­ent for it and an obsess­ive fan­dom for it — which might also not mean much to audi­ences who don’t appre­ci­ate America’s pastime. 

It might sound as if I am a hypo­crite regard­ing screen viol­ence – some­times it works and some­times it doesn’t — but I can get behind it if there’s some kind of mor­al com­pass at work, which is the case in Macon Blair’s reboot of the legendary Troma B‑movie anti­hero story, The Toxic Avenger. Besides, the gore in a film like this is just like cus­tard pies for grown-ups — ridicu­lous slap­stick — and if the tim­ing of the edit­ing works along­side the sound effects then a good time can safely be had by all.

The sil­li­ness is the point — Blair’s script is very witty — but The Toxic Avenger is also a bet­ter ver­sion of a “state of mod­ern America” pic­ture than Aster’s Eddington last week. Peter Dinklage plays dot­ing step­fath­er to Jacob Tremblay’s sens­it­ive teen­age orphan, liv­ing in a New Jersey town (called St. Roma) dom­in­ated by a fact­ory that spews out unreg­u­lated tox­ic waste while mak­ing utterly inef­fec­tu­al well­ness products.

Dinklage is a jan­it­or at the fact­ory and pro­longed expos­ure to all that waste means he’s grow­ing tumours through­out his brain. Health insur­ance prov­ing to be use­less, he tries to steal some cash from the vault but the rob­bery goes wrong and he — and his mop — are dumped into the green goo from which he emerges the next day as a repuls­ive mon­ster with super powers and a still-decent heart.

If you needed any con­firm­a­tion that this Toxic Avenger is on the right side of his­tory, note the pres­ence of two Ted Lasso alumni in the cast. That would make for an inter­est­ing cros­sov­er. Final les­son is that when you really want to find some qual­ity post-industrial waste­land loc­a­tions, you need to go to Eastern Europe — Bulgaria in this case.

How to Make a Killing (return­ing from the recent French Film Festival) has some viol­ent moments but these are also played for comedy:

An even dark­er com­edy is on offer in Franck Dubosc’s How to Make a Killing (aka Un ours dans le jura – A Bear in the Jura, I can under­stand why the lit­er­al trans­la­tion here wasn’t used …). Dubosc him­self plays Michel, a strug­gling pine tree farm­er on the verge of the Christmas rush, is startled by an unlikely bear on the road and crashes his ute into a rich-looking couple who have stopped by the side of the road for a pee. These are not your aver­age rich-looking couple, how­ever, as they are inter­me­di­ar­ies between some hardened gang­sters and migrant drug mules in the forest. The 2 mil­lion Euros in their car then becomes a source of some tempta­tion – not just for Michel and his wife (Laure Calamy) but for every­one in the vil­lage who comes into con­tact with it.

Played with admir­able dead­pan by every­one – not least the out­gunned town cop, Benoît Poelvoorde – this is anoth­er crowd-pleaser with some neat plot twists. It also man­ages to pat­ron­ise the poor migrants who are giv­en not-a-jot of their own human­ity to share with the audience.

Returning (in some regions) from the New Zealand International Film Festival is David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds:

The Shrouds might be David Cronenberg’s most overtly per­son­al film in an almost 60-year career. It con­tains many of his visu­al trade­marks – the body hor­ror moments are less plen­ti­ful but just as shock­ing when they arrive. Cronenberg avatar Vincent Cassel plays a griev­ing hus­band (Cronenberg lost his wife, Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017) who invents a kind of 3D scan­ning wrap­per that can present an image of your deceased loved ones decay­ing body onto a head­stone screen or, if you prefer, you can mon­it­or it remotely using an app.

He’s a tech CEO now, plan­ning a glob­al expan­sion of these digit­ally enhanced buri­al grounds, but he’s also haunted by images of his late wife (Diane Kruger who also plays her twin sis­ter) and the ter­rible deteri­or­a­tion as can­cer spread through­out her body.

While grief is both text and sub­text in The Shrouds, Cronenberg also gives us a mod­ern thrill­er includ­ing both con­spir­acy the­or­ies and actu­al con­spir­acies, as well as satire about Chinese indus­tri­al espi­on­age, digit­al sur­veil­lance, self-driving cars and AI assist­ants who can present them­selves as wom­bats to make them­selves less creepy.

Ultimately, The Shrouds is about what hap­pens to someone when they can’t keep a prom­ise to the dead …

Finally, I’ve men­tioned reg­u­larly here that star-studded stream­ing titles have been a con­sist­ent Saturday night dis­ap­point­ment and I’m sorry to report that we have a new champion.

Both the editor-in-chief and I fell asleep dur­ing Chris Columbus’ adapt­a­tion of the pub­lish­ing phe­nomen­on that is The Thursday Murder Club. Everything about it is lazy, not least Pierce Brosnan’s attempt at a cock­ney accent. I can see the poten­tial of the concept — a group of true crime-obsessed pen­sion­ers solve a murder much closer to their retire­ment home — but we already have Only Murders in the Building, thanks, and exe­cu­tion is everything. You can’t just throw these people togeth­er in a rest home that looks like Downton Abbey and assume everything will work out.

You have to write a script, dir­ect the act­ors, have a point of view. Our Saturday nights in front of the telly from now on, are now going to be devoted to proven qual­ity which means — prob­ably — some­thing much older. As I like to say, there are more good old films than there are good new films and the stream­ers are prov­ing me right, week in and week out.