Caught Stealing **1/2

Sometimes you can watch an actor going hard with a performance that feels out of synch with the movie around them, and that’s what Austin Butler delivers here, reaching for real emotional depth in a movie that’s otherwise fairly flippant about its quirky-violent-caper dynamics. Butler plays Hank Thompson, a one-time promising pro baseball prospect now tending bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, when he gets caught up in the mayhem when multiple dangerous characters come looking for his next-door neighbor (Matt Smith). Screenwriter Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel, sets the action in 1998 New York, partly to get a grittier verge-of-gentrification vibe and partly, it seems, to evoke New Yorker nostalgia for sights like Kim’s Video and the Twin Towers in the skyli

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