Thank you so much for listening. The Next Best Picture Podcast is proud to be a part of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. You can subscribe to us anywhere you listen to podcasts or listen in the embedded player below. Please take a moment to review us on Apple Podcasts here. And if you’re feeling generous, you enjoy what you hear, and you want to hear more, please help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month, and you’ll receive some exclusive podcast content from us, including this review ad-free.

You can follow Matt, Giovanni, Joselyn & Jonathan and hear more of their thoughts on the Oscars and Film on X at @NextBestPicture, @TheGiovanniLago, @GoldenWinter_28 & @jonathanfujii_

The post The Next Best Picture Podcast – “Caught Stealing” appeared first on Next Best Picture.

THE CAST – Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, Benito A Martínez Ocasio, Action Bronson & Carol Kane

THE TEAM – Darren Aronofsky (Director) & Charlie Huston (Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 107 Minutes

Darren Aronofsky’s films often prove elusive, his distinctly bleak sensibilities leaving little incentive for repeat viewings. “Requiem for a Dream” sits on the Mount Rushmore of unrelentingly bleak cinema, brilliant in execution but a punishing litmus test for who would willingly return to such despair. His last feature, “The Whale,” felt like a rare misstep, its manufactured hopefulness clashing with Aronofsky’s tonal instincts, even if it did rejuvenate Brendan Fraser’s career. So when news broke that Aronofsky was directing an action vehicle starring Academy Award nominee Austin Butler, still riding a hot streak, it was hard not to be curious. Thankfully, “Caught Stealing” delivers. A grungy crime thriller, it proves that even Aronofsky can channel his harsh showmanship into something riotously entertaining.

Adapting Charlie Huston’s novel, Aronofsky follows Hank Thompson (Butler), a California transplant bartending in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the late 1990s. Hank is just another guy, save for the demons of a failed MLB career that continue to haunt him. He obsesses over the San Francisco Giants’ Wild Card chase, dutifully calls his mother each day, and entertains early-morning hookups with Zoë Kravitz’s Yvonne, a paramedic hoping to turn their fling into something more. Barely holding his life together, Hank’s world unravels after agreeing to watch the cat of his mohawked neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), a favor that plunges him into New York’s criminal underworld. The premise may sound familiar, but Aronofsky and Huston’s recreation of late-’90s New York feels so gritty and lived-in that it remains constantly engaging. Credit goes to Matthew Libatique, Aronofsky’s frequent cinematographer, who captures both the griminess and vitality of the Lower East Side, Queens, and Brighton Beach.

What makes “Caught Stealing” fascinating is how Aronofsky infuses subtle touches from his earlier work into what is arguably his most “commercial” project in years. At times, it carries the pulse of a mid-2000s action movie, yet always through Aronofsky’s lens. Chase sequences, car crashes, and shootouts roar with intensity, elevated by immaculate production design and sound editing that make every blow felt. In one standout early scene, Hank is pummeled by two Russian goons, with each rib-crunching hit synced to the sound of a bat cracking a baseball. It’s a visceral, wince-inducing device that exemplifies the film’s inventive brutality. Huston’s screenplay is unexpectedly funny too, often mining humor from its violence, most memorably in a recurring gag where Smith’s Russ repeatedly suffers blows to the head, somehow staying funny until the very end.

Still, none of this would work without Butler, who once again knocks it out of the park. He transforms his natural charisma into a character defined by regret, Miller High Life, and arrested development, embodying a loser who still can’t shake his magnetism. In many ways, “Caught Stealing” plays like a blood-soaked coming-of-age story, charting one man’s belated attempt to move forward after years of self-neglect. Butler’s chemistry with Kravitz is another highlight; their connection is instantly electric, making one wish the film gave them even more screen time. Surrounding them is a colorful ensemble: Regina King as a hardened detective, Benito Martinez Ocasio as a menacing club owner, and Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber as a pair of terrifyingly funny hitmen. Smith, meanwhile, gradually emerges as a standout, his odd-couple dynamic with Butler both grating and hilarious.

The screenplay occasionally stumbles under the weight of its many revelations, some of which feel more like narrative fuel than genuine surprises. The story strains to keep momentum as it juggles twists and character threads, and while Aronofsky ties things together in a satisfying way for some, others may find the ending underwhelming. Still, in a summer crowded with blockbusters that failed to meet expectations, “Caught Stealing” stands out as one of the few worth revisiting. Who would have guessed the most entertaining release of the season wouldn’t be about superheroes or dinosaurs, but a sexily scuzzy action thriller about a washed-up baseball player stumbling through New York’s underworld?

The post “CAUGHT STEALING” appeared first on Next Best Picture.

Plot Synopsis: Burned-out ex-baseball player Hank Thompson unexpectedly finds himself embroiled in a dangerous struggle for survival amidst the criminal underbelly of 1990s New York City, forced to navigate a treacherous underworld he never imagined.

What do you all think of the trailer? Darren Aronofsky returns to theaters for the first time since his Oscar-winning film “The Whale.” This time, he’s gathered another all-star cast, led by Austin Butler, whose star only continues to rise. It looks like classic Aronofsky – violent and uncompromising, but this trailer has a more fun energy than might be expected just from reading the plot synopsis. He has been vocal in stating it will be different than his other films. Are you prepared for it? Are you excited for “Caught Stealing?” Please let us know by sharing your thoughts in the comments section below or on our X account.

The post Trailer – “Caught Stealing” appeared first on Next Best Picture.

​This is a preview of the podcast. The full version is only available to those who subscribe to us on Patreon. For the small price of $1 a month, you can receive this podcast along with other exclusive podcast content, so be sure to subscribe here.

Thank you so much for listening. The Next Best Picture Podcast is proud to be a part of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. You can subscribe to us anywhere you listen to podcasts or listen in the embedded player below. Please take a moment to review us on Apple Podcasts here. And if you’re feeling generous, you enjoy what you hear, and you want to hear more, please help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month, and you’ll receive some exclusive podcast content from us.

You can follow Matt, Josh, Alyssa & Dan and hear more of their thoughts on the Oscars and Film on Twitter @NextBestPicture, @JRParhm, @veganmoviesnob & @dancindanonfilm

The post The Next Best Picture Podcast – “Black Swan” appeared first on Next Best Picture.

THE CAST – Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey & Winona Ryder

THE TEAM – Darren Aronofsky (Director), Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz & John McLaughlin (Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 108 Minutes

Ask any random person on the street to name a ballet, and they will likely respond with one of two titles: Christmas staple “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake.” Even people who aren’t fans of ballet have probably heard of “Swan Lake,” given that its fairy tale story and famously stylized choreography (as well as its famous, gender-swapped reimagining by Matthew Bourne) have given it a cultural foothold that most other ballets have struggled to reach in the past century. The ballet’s plot, as described twice in Darren Aronofsky’s psychosexual thriller “Black Swan,” revolves around Odette, a young woman who has been turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer. She can only be fully returned to human form if someone who has never loved before vows to love her forever. She meets a Prince who does, but the sorcerer tricks him by sending an evil double to him. Heartbroken, Odette decides to kill herself. In a stroke of genius, Aronofsky’s film uses the plot of the ballet as a rough outline for its own story about a young ballerina whose already fragile mental state deteriorates further as she rehearses for the ballet’s lead role. In doing so, “Black Swan” takes its audience on a visceral trip through the mind of a dancer, laying bare all the internal and external pressures that come with even this most beautiful, seemingly effortless art form.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman in an Oscar-winning performance) presents as a picture-perfect ballerina, but she’s dealing with some real psychological issues. Nina still lives with her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey, brilliantly walking the fine line between over- and underplaying), a former corps de ballet dancer with the same company for which Nina is now a soloist, has a bedroom decorated all in pink with dozens of stuffed animals, and still speaks in pinched, high-pitch register of a prepubescent girl. Nina dreams of dancing a principal role with the company and gets her chance when the company’s Artistic Director Thomas (the perfectly smarmy Vincent Cassel) decides it’s time for new blood in their upcoming production of “Swan Lake,” which he wants to be as stripped back and visceral as possible. The principal dancer must dance two roles, and while Nina fully embodies the virginal, pure Odette (the White Swan), she doesn’t have any of the performance qualities required to play her evil double Odille (the Black Swan). After a botched audition, Nina visits Thomas privately to try to get the part, but when he goes in for a kiss, she shocks them both by biting him. This gets her the part, but in rehearsals, she’s too focused on perfecting the movement and not enough on embodying the character. As Thomas pushes her, and as newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis, sneakily hilarious in a tricky part) makes herself known to both Thomas and Nina as Nina’s sensual, if imperfect, opposite, Nina’s tightly wound psyche begins to unravel, seeing dark doppelgängers of herself everywhere and scratching at a rash that resembles gooseflesh. Will she be able to break through and give the performance of her dreams?

Every dance film owes a debt to “The Red Shoes,” Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Technicolor masterpiece on the struggle of a performing artist. Numerous films – from Oscar Best Picture winner “An American in Paris” to early ’00s cheese-fest “Center Stage” – build upon the groundwork laid by “The Red Shoes.” The narrative of having to choose between love and art, its characters’ obsessive quality, and its titular ballet’s uniquely cinematic qualities have all been passed down from dance film to dance film through the decades. “Black Swan” may be the only film since then to attempt to do the same thing as “The Red Shoes,” doubling as an adaptation of a fairy tale and a story about a ballerina dancing a ballet based on that fairy tale. Unlike “The Red Shoes,” however, “Black Swan” has the heart of a grotty haunted house B-movie, from its numerous fake-out jump scares to its gnarly body horror and outré sense of sexuality. Reimagining “Swan Lake” as a horror film is a stroke of genius. Still, the screenplay (by Mark Heyman, John McLaughlin, and Andres Heinz from a story by Heinz) also wants to be a dramatic character study of an obsessive artist. The balance in the screenplay is tilted too much toward horror for the film to reach its loftiest goals, but Aronofsky directs it with such verve and technical control that it’s clear that – at least at this point in his career – he’d found the perfect balance between his pursuit of artistic perfection and his more baroque tendencies.

Taking his cue from the screenplay, Aronofsky sets out to make “Black Swan” as visceral and real as possible, stripping away anything that isn’t directly focused on Nina’s perception of herself and the world around her. It’s one of the most successful pieces of subjective filmmaking, putting the audience directly into the lead character’s headspace – and what a freaky place it is! Shooting on grainy Super 16mm film, cinematographer Matthew Libatique gets striking contrasts out of the blinding whites and deep blacks of the film’s color palette. The slinky long takes of Nina and others dancing and rehearsing, with the handheld camera gliding around them, leaving no trace of its existence in the full-length mirrors that cover the rehearsal spaces, only heighten the film’s tension, undergirding every scene with the undeniable sense that something is not quite right with what we’re seeing. The sound mix only further heightens this, with breaths, laughing, heartbeats, and wings appearing on the soundtrack whenever Nina’s psyche fractures further. Clint Mansell’s score interpolates Tchaikovsky’s iconic themes into dark, atmospheric piano plinks and bass strums, as well as a full-on poppers o’clock EDM rave track that plays under a masterfully conceived and edited drug trip scene. The production design is full of mirrors and reflective surfaces, cutting Nina into smaller versions of herself and presenting even more doubles, including some who seem to have minds of their own. The film builds its horror slowly, ratcheting up the tension and gaining momentum steadily as it goes, culminating in a performance sequence as viscerally cinematic as the ballet in “The Red Shoes” in a less fantastical way (until its final seconds), as Nina finally fully embraces her inner black swan.

All this fantastic craft would mean nothing without a great actress in the central role, and Portman delivers. The actress has always allowed the audience to see her work in a way that can push them away, but in “Black Swan,” that quality dovetails so perfectly with the film’s themes that it draws in the audience. The way she pinches her voice to achieve that specific girly register is almost painful to listen to, and it becomes even more so when Nina tries to stand up for herself but has such a lack of self-confidence that her voice can barely register above a whisper. The moment when Nina calls her mom from a bathroom stall, smiling through tears, squeaking out the words “he picked me, Mommy,” after getting cast as the Swan Queen is among the finest moments of Portman’s accomplished career, a moment of total surrender to pure feeling that we get only flashes of elsewhere here, at least until the film’s gonzo last act. It’s not just her vocal work that impresses, though. While she doesn’t quite have the bearing and body control to pass as a prima ballerina to those in the know – thankfully, the scenes where a dance double was used are flawlessly rendered – she uses her physicality in other ways to externalize Nina’s internal struggle. Portman’s natural stiffness becomes an extension of Nina’s repression (both sexual and otherwise), allowing the actress to mirror Nina’s own valiant struggle to break free from her self-imposed cage. When she finally does break free in the film’s last act, Portman lets all control over her body go, throwing her arms around with drunken abandon and even dropping her vocal register, a flash of who Nina could have been had she not gone down this path of pursuing artistic perfection and instead simply lived.

The film’s last act is, in many ways, a technical masterpiece, bringing all of the film’s disparate elements together in a swirling symphony of cinema. The one big problem is that the film doesn’t go quite far enough in showing how Nina embraces her inner black swan until the final performance. Because the screenplay is so committed to its rickety B-horror movie shenanigans, Nina spends most of the film running away from her darker side; even after rolling on drugs with Lily during a night out, she still has neither more self-confidence nor looseness than she did before. When Nina finally lashes out against her doppelgänger and forcefully says that it’s her turn, it’s a cheer-worthy moment (of sorts), but it also comes out of virtually nowhere, with only Nina’s increasingly self-destructive skin-picking and (wholly justifiable) lashing out against her mother to lean on as precursors. What really sells it is Portman’s performance while she prepares for the famous Black Swan coda: Moving her body as though she’s waking up from a long slumber and is feeling her muscles come alive, she walks the backstage wings like a tiger stalking its prey, fully waking just before she has to go onstage when her face contorts into the smile of one possessed with artistic rapture. As Tchaikovsky’s immortal music grows in intensity, the film’s visual effects go into overdrive, making Nina’s transformation into the black swan thrillingly literal. It’s an over-the-top climax that’s utterly in keeping with Aronofsky’s mixture of art-house and B-movie sensibilities. Even if the screenplay doesn’t fully warrant the investment of such an immaculate filmmaking technique, the use of it only makes the film more involving and entertaining. “Black Swan” stands as proof that films have been elevating horror to the level of art for decades, and when they get it right, the results are exhilarating.

The post “BLACK SWAN” appeared first on Next Best Picture.

Thank you so much for listening. The Next Best Picture Podcast is proud to be a part of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. You can subscribe to us on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, GooglePlay, Tunein, Player FM, Acast & Castbox or you can listen down below. Please take a moment to review us on Apple Podcasts here. And if you’re feeling generous, you enjoy what you hear and want to hear more, please help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month and you’ll receive some exclusive podcast content.

You can follow Matt, Josh & Dan and hear more of their thoughts on the Oscars and Film on Twitter @NextBestPicture, @JRParham & @dancindanonfilm

The post The Next Best Picture Podcast – “The Whale” appeared first on Next Best Picture.

​​An online Zoom class on expository writing features a screen filled with the faces of students, with only the square for the class instructor blacked out, the victim of a malfunctioning laptop camera, he claims. We are soon taken through the laptop screen to meet Charlie, the instructor hiding behind that black screen. There’s a reason why Charlie lied about his camera malfunctioning — he weighs almost 600 pounds and is primarily confined to the sunken cushions of his living room couch, a prisoner within his own body.

Still shattered by the suicide of his lover Alan, Charlie has embarked on a course of self-destruction, eating so much that his body will eventually give out, and his torment will be over. He is, however, surrounded by loved ones who want to instill in him the will to live. Most notably, Liz (Hong Chau), Alan’s sister and a primary nurse by training, tends to Charlie’s many medical needs and strongly urges him to go to the hospital before his congestive heart failure becomes fatal. Yet, at the same time, she enables him by providing meatball subs with extra cheese.

Charlie’s quiet life is soon interrupted by the appearance of Elder Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary of a Mormon-like cult who wants Charlie to embrace Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. It turns out that Charlie knows quite a bit about this cult since Alan was a member, and the conflict between his church’s teachings and his sexuality caused Alan to jump off a bridge. Thomas is invited to stay since Charlie wants to know what really happened that day.

Suddenly upending Charlie’s life, though, is his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he had not seen in ten years and is still bitter about being abandoned by her dad when he walked away from his family. Charlie desperately wants to reconnect with Ellie, even offering to pay her if only she would agree to talk to him again. Ellie’s tough but about to crack; a misfit who, afraid of being attacked herself, lashes out first, and the venom she directs toward Charlie is particularly stinging, even if much of it is true. Frankly, he doesn’t care — you can see from the look in his eyes that he still loves her desperately.

It is in those moments that lies the key to the brilliance of Fraser’s performance. In many cases where makeup is used to change an actor’s appearance, the appliances obscure the actor’s work, or, as is often said, “the makeup did all the acting.” Not so here. Even under the weight of a 300-pound fat suit and prosthetics that severely hamper his every movement and expression, all it takes is one look at Fraser’s face, and under all that artificial fat, we fully see those eyes. There he is! There’s the guy we love and have missed! And it’s primarily through Fraser’s expressive eyes that we are allowed to see Charlie fully.

A great deal of the effectiveness of “The Whale” lies in the quality of the actors in this small cast. Sink probably has the film’s most challenging female role, as Ellie is written as a brute pain for 95% of the film, with her redemption only coming in the film’s final 15 minutes. It is a tough character structure to make sympathetic. Still, Sink is accomplished enough that she manages to show shadings between the barbs, particularly in her scenes with Simpkin’s Thomas, where we begin to see the first cracks in her rigid exterior. Also providing brief but strong support is Samantha Morton’s Mary, who is still bitter that Charlie walked away from their marriage for a man, but their shared love and worry over Ellie reveals that there is still a spark between them. (Morton’s zingers here will be the stuff of internet memes for months to come.)

Ultimately, though, it is Hong Chau’s work that, next to Fraser’s, stays with audiences the most. Her Liz is a walking contradiction, as both a woman who wants to save Charlie by her medical intervention yet enables his very destruction by providing the food that can end his life. But still, they stay together. It would seem that by keeping Charlie alive, she could keep alive the spirit of her late brother for as long as possible. It is moving work by Hong, delicately performed, and one that stays in the memory long after the credits have rolled.

Aronofsky does nothing to hide the film’s theatrical origins, shooting the film with longtime cinematographer Matthew Libatique and framing it in Academy ratio as if to emphasize the confines of the play and the closed-in world in which Charlie exists. Playwright Samuel D. Hunter has adapted his stage play to film and made some wise changes in the transition, shrewdly resisting the temptation to open up the play with any outside scenes. It works just fine without them, although it doesn’t shake the creakiness of the play’s first act, in which little occurs, and Charlie is often reduced to being a recessive mess, muttering “I’m sorrys” to even the mildest criticism. Happily, though, “The Whale” springs to life in its final two acts where the film truly catches fire. The last five minutes are, in fact, utterly transcendent.

Aronofsky wisely steps back and lets the story speak for itself for much of the film’s first half, carefully calibrating the film’s tone, which allows his actors to be the focus of attention. But those trademark Aronofsky touches soon rear their head when Charlie decides to end it all, gorging himself with a nightmare orgy of food reminiscent of the most obsessive moments of “Black Swan” and giving off a kind of horror vibe that only Aronofsky can supply. From there, the film keeps driving until its final emotional shot, which drew an audible gasp and visible tears as audience members left the screening.

Fraser has one unique element in his favor- the audience wants to see him succeed like no other actor out there- and that love inevitably transfers over to Charlie. The fact that Fraser is so good in the role and that Aronofsky is so skilled at shaping the performance combine to make “The Whale” a uniquely powerful film experience. One more thing: bring Kleenex. I guarantee you’ll need it.

The post “THE WHALE” appeared first on Next Best Picture.