After The Hunt an overstuffed culture war drama, crime caper Caught Stealing entertains

After The Hunt (M18)

122 minutes, showing on Prime Video
★★☆☆☆

The story: Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino steers an American philosophy professor, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), through a sexual assault scandal involving her colleague-lover and her prized student.

Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) claims she was raped after a drunken party, and handsy assistant professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) maintains she is fabricating the vengeful accusation against him because he caught her plagiarising her PhD dissertation.

Both expect Alma to advocate for them.

Set in Yale University in the United States during the 2019 #MeToo movement, After The Hunt is, however, not so straightforward a “he said, she said”, not when Maggie is the black gay daughter of the institution’s millionaire donors smitten with her mentor Alma.

It is a contest between optics and ethics complicated by identity politics, class entitlement and generational differences. Alma is irked by Maggie’s eagerness to publicise the injustice.

With her tenure at stake, she is weighing the correct, rather than truthful, response to the furore.

She is an icy blonde cynic, contemptuous of even her doting therapist husband (Michael Stuhlbarg), and Hollywood star Roberts, at 58 and long past her ingenue winsomeness, is commanding in a trinity of unlikeable self-serving characters.

All the same, the overstuffed culture war drama is too academic to provoke. Never has a movie by Guadagnino, the sensualist behind Call Me By Your Name (2017) and Challengers (2024), been this leached of passion. The moral ambiguities lead nowhere.

The director is trusting the audiences to think for themselves.

That is a privilege rare in cinema these days, except viewers are left thinking only of how much more devastating the Cate Blanchett psychological thriller Tar (2022) was in critiquing woke ideology among the educated elite.

Hot take: The talking-point drama is two hours of high-brow talk with little point to make on issues that are already dated.

Caught Stealing (M18)

107 minutes, showing on Apple TV
★★★★☆

The story: Twenty-something bartender Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) cat-sits for his neighbour and is suddenly, to his bewilderment, visited at his shabby apartment by motley murderous gangs.

Caught Stealing is set in 1998 New York City. It is American film-maker Darren Aronofsky’s love letter to his home, specifically, the scuzzy energy of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he made his first films.

But this adaptation of American author Charlie Huston’s 2004 graphic novel is nothing like Pi (1998), Requiem For A Dream (2000) or Black Swan (2010). The director of miserabilist auteur cinema wants purely to entertain with a slam-bang crime caper that literally puts the handsome Elvis (2022) star Butler through his paces, playing the hapless hero.

Hank is a former baseball prodigy running from his failures – including committing to his girlfriend (Zoe Kravitz) – and, now, from a narcotics detective (Regina King), the Russian thugs of a Puerto Rican kingpin (Bad Bunny) and two Hasidic Jewish hitman brothers (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio).

What is the missing loot these factions want from him?

Hank’s English punk neighbour (Matt Smith with a mohawk), who has it, has skipped town, leaving him to be tortured. He loses a kidney in a punch-up, then everyone he loves is killed.

Even the cat gets hurt.

The violence is screwball yet shockingly brutal, and Hank, in Butler’s charismatic performance, is a sweet-natured loser who feels real pain.

His odyssey is a nostalgia tour of the city, the chaotic backdrop along with the mosaic of villains injecting colourful personality as he navigates past dive bars, sidewalk drunks and public pay phones until he finally stops running to take control of his destiny.

Hot take: It is a happy ending for the kitty, another reason to recommend this propulsive comedy thriller.