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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.

I’ve been a fan of Austin Butler’s ever since I saw him in The Shannara Chronicles. While the series left much to be desired as an adaptation of one of my very favorite epic fantasy series, Butler really did shine as Wil Ohmsford. Little did I know that he would go on to have a remarkable subsequent career, excelling at playing a particular type of tortured and troubled young man, all while looking like a fallen angel. (Yes, I might be a little in love with him after watching his film).

The most recent iteration of this figure is Hank Thompson, a young man who once had a promising career in baseball but, due to a drunk driving accident–one that took the life of his friend–he has spent the subsequent years drinking away his troubles and carrying on a quasi-relationship with Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). His entire life is turned upside down, however, when his next-door neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) leaves for London, which sets in motion a train of events that sees Hank dealing with a corrupt cop, Elise Roman (Regina King), her goons, and two Hasidic brothers who are more than happy to kill anyone who gets in their way (Liv Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio). While Hank eventually gets a happy ending of sorts, he has to sacrifice much along the way.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Darren Aronovsky’s Caught Stealing is one of my favorite movies of this year. It’s the type of crime thriller that knows what its purpose is and it doesn’t try to be anything else. It is one of a long history of films about an everyman who finds himself caught up in forces that he knows nothing about and has to use all of his considerable skills to survive. There are more than a few bodies left by the wayside, but this isn’t a cynical film. It is, instead, a blunt look at the dreadful lengths to which people will go for money.

Indeed, there’s a beautiful brutality to the film, one that’s anchored by Butler’s performance. He’s one of those actors who manages to combine in his person the beauty and the hardness of masculinity. Part of it is, I think, the cherubic beauty of his face, which looks like it sprang out of a Renaissance painting, and this sits somewhat at odds with the lean muscularity of his frame. Aronovsky gives us many opportunities to appreciate his masculine beauty, and there are moments when his raw sexuality seems to just envelope the screen and us along with it.

At the same time, Butler also makes clear that Hank is a man haunted by his past and, at first, he struggles to make sense of the violent world of which he is now a part, let alone figure out a way to survive. As the violence escalates, he finds that he, too, has to give away a little slice of his humanity in order to make it out alive. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some humor here, too, because there is. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a crime comedy, but there were some moments when I did laugh out loud (though it’s fair to point out that most of these moments involved Bud the cat, who proves to be Hank’s best sidekick).

As much as Caught Stealing is about Hank’s efforts to stay alive–and, if possible, to keep those he loves from getting caught in the crossfire–it’s also about making peace with his traumatic past. At numerous points in the film he wakes up from troubled dreams in which he is forced to relive the terrible moment when his drunk driving ended up killing his best friend and shattering his knee, thus derailing his promising baseball career. It’s only when he takes accountability for what he did that he can move forward, that he can stop running and seize control of his own destiny. There’s something apposite and even poetic about the fact that, in the film’s third act, he slams the car he’s driving into a pillar, killing the Hasidic brothers Lipa and Shmully in the process. Given that these two men were the ones responsible for the death of his beloved Yvonne, this moment is even more satisfying.

Butler might be the heart and soul of this film, but he’s matched by a formidable supporting cast. Of these, the best is, I think, Regina King, who never fails to impress. From the moment that Roman appears in Hank’s apartment, one gets the sense that there’s more to her than meets the eye. She seems to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in playing mind games with Hank, trying to jar something loose, as she puts it. As soon becomes clear, however, she’s brutal and violent and ruthless, and she will do anything to get her hands on the money that Russ has stolen. And, because King is just such a charismatic screen presence–and because she so effortless exudes authority–you almost find yourself wanting Hank to just do what she says so he can make it out alive (even if, as is also clear, she’ll almost certainly kill him once she gets what she wants).

And, lest you be concerned about Bud the cat, let me rush to tell you that he makes it all the way to the end! I must admit that I was a bit nervous, and if this was a movie in which the cat dies I most certainly would have hated it. Instead, the fact that Hank is so willing to look out for a feline companion that Russ foisted on him says a great deal about his innate goodness, and one can’t help but cheer for him as he tries to wrest some control of his life from those who consistently try to take away what little agency he has.

That, I think, is what makes Caught Stealing such a perfect film for our present moment. We’re all at the mercy of bad faith actors, and many of us feel as if we’re playing a game that is rigged against us, with no real knowledge of the rules or who we can trust. This film reminds us that it’s up to us to seize our destiny, though hopefully with fewer bodies left behind.

There is an elegiac tone and a dash of wit in this lovely, small-scale film held together by Willem Dafoe‘s magnetic presence and natural but compelling performance. He plays Lucius, the American manager of a grand hotel in Vienna, a job he has taken pride in for two decades and will lose soon when a new owner takes over. “This is the house where I live. And now I find myself forced to abandon it,” he says in voiceover. His sadness is lightened a bit by the oddity of the details he values in that same voiceover. “Hotel Intercontinental Vienna. The first luxury brand hotel in the world and the first one to have telephones in every bathroom.”

As we follow him through several days, he shows himself to be annoyed at the change, unwilling to admit that the hotel’s glory days are over, and finally reconciled to something new, whatever that turns out to be. The Souffleur would be a very different work without Dafoe. He makes the character and the entire film down-to-earth and accessible, two things Gastón Solnicki is not known for.

The Argentinian-born director is known and admired for his artistically daring but often cryptic films, as varied as Papirosen (2011), built from his own family’s trove of home movies, and Kekszakallu (2016), a quasi-documentary about adolescent girls coming of age, which won that year’s FIPRESCI prize for best film in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival.  

Even with Dafoe, Solnicki’s approach hasn’t changed all that much. This latest Venice premiere is definitely a work of fragments, isolated scenes that amount to a fly-on-the-wall view of Lucius but are not meant to create a traditional narrative, or for the pieces to fit together as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle.

Weaving in and out of Lucius’ story are black-and-white images of the hotel in the past, from construction to children ice skating outside, to the glamour of a crowded dining room. Much of that footage is archival (the Intercontinental is a real hotel in Vienna, and not dead), some of it enhanced by Solnicki. Those scenes serve to blend the past and present in a way that suits the film’s impressionistic style.

Every now and then some of the hotel’s staff members face the camera and announce their name and room number, for no apparent reason except to let us know they are there and probably about to be displaced. One of those workers is Lilly (Lilly Lindner), Lucius’ daughter, who grew up in the hotel but is far less attached to it than her father and ready to move on. In one scene between her and Lucius, he expresses his concern, looking at her arm and asking if she has been harming herself again. But where a traditional film would lean into the family dynamics, The Souffleur lets those moments sit with us and moves on. At one point we see giraffes. Who knows why?

Although Lucius spends a lot of time walking the halls and checking the hotel’s dining room, he also meets the new owner, Facundo Ordoñez, a rich Argentinian played by Solnicki. Improbably, they have a cordial relationship. And when Ordoñez plays tennis, Solnicki gives him a wiry nervous energy that adds a touch of humor.

There is nothing funny about the film’s jokey title, which is just a strained metaphor. A soufflé rises slowly in the oven at the start, and Lucius and another staff member debate why the chef’s soufflés have been bad lately. The falling soufflé as a symbol of the crumbling hotel is the kind of heavy-handed touch Solnicki rarely indulges.

More often the images are evocative and visually stunning, shot by Rui Poças, the cinematographer who often works with Miguel Gomes, including on the recent, visually arresting Grand Tour. Outdoor scenes especially are artfully composed, such as a distant view of a bridge with the river flowing under it in the foreground, or the glistening look of a puddle on the street at night. Solnicki often likes to keep the camera still, as people walk in and out of the frame.

The Souffleur is a brief hour and 18 minutes long, and just as much a tone poem as it is a character study. Dafoe brings ballast and humanity to it, uniting its fragments as Lucius decides what to do with his future. It’s worth remembering that Dafoe started his career in theater as a member of the avant-garde Wooster Group and understands stories that defy conventional narratives. He is just the person to make this beautifully made little film come to life.

I love when a project has a title that seems just a little off but offers a purposeful piece of wordplay. 

It doesn’t have to be distractingly askew. 

Take, for example, Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher, the new documentary by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song). It’s a title you could skim a dozen times without stopping and going, “Wait, isn’t the idiom ‘life and times’?” 

It takes very little time into Geller and Goldfine’s slightly overstuffed and slightly imbalanced documentary to recognize what they’re doing. 

Peter Asher is one of several figures who served as the Forrest Gump or Zelig or Chance the Gardener of the counterculture — people who pop up in the background of seemingly every photograph taken across several decades, whose names grace the liner notes of every significant album, whose accomplishments merit acknowledgment in countless award show speeches.

If you’re a devotee of Swinging London of the ’60s or the Sunset Strip folk rock scene of the ’70s, he’s already an icon. But even if you’re not, his integrality to countless pop culture narratives beggars belief, because he has, indeed, lived many lives both in the spotlight and immediately adjacent. The pleasure of Everywhere Man is that every time you think you’ve seen the wildest piece of Peter Asher adjacency, the next chapter proves you wrong. Kinda.

The problem of having multiple lives, though, is that not all lives are created equal. At 117 minutes, Everywhere Man is a sprawling film, one that goes from exciting and unpredictable to the stuff of countless rock-n-roll biopics, but the directors treat everything equally — or else lack the material to make the second half of the documentary anywhere near as engaging as the first.

The bold-type version of Asher’s career is that he went from one-half of the British Invasion duo Peter & Gordon — you’ll recognize “World Without Love” — to the legendary producer who steered artists like James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to the biggest hits of their careers. He has called himself one of the inspirations for Austin Powers, and his list of celebrity friends includes … everybody.

But it’s the little details and not the broad strokes that inspired Asher to write and perform the one-man show — or “musical memoir” — that Geller and Goldfine use as the spine of the documentary. 

To hint at only a few of the head-scratching biographical oddities of Asher’s lives: His father was the physician responsible for identifying and naming Munchausen syndrome. He and his ginger siblings had acting careers promoted with the unlikely headshot promo “All Have Red Hair.” He contributed, directly or indirectly, to the relationships between Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He helped introduce Taylor to Carole King and helped convince Carole King to perform as a solo artist. 

The first half of the documentary is a delightful and thoroughly unlikely progression through one of the most colorful artistic moments in recent history, steered by Asher’s own memories and appearances by friends including Twiggy, Eric Idle and many more. The music is wonderful and the archival footage a blast. 

I compared Asher to Zelig and Forrest Gump and Chance the Gardener, but that’s reductive. Some parts of his rise were absolutely based on happenstance and circumstance: His sister was dating Paul McCartney (interviewed here in audio only), who allowed Peter & Gordon to record “World Without Love,” a Lennon-McCartney composition that Lennon hated. But however self-deprecating Asher often is, it’s clear that he was more than just in the right place at the right time. He was talented, and there were bigger-picture societal trends that he helped bring together. 

Interestingly, as the documentary goes from the parts of Asher’s biography that might be interpreted as luck-driven to the chapters in which his genius is most obvious, it becomes less entertaining, albeit never unentertaining. 

Taylor is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in his growth from the first artist signed to the Beatles’ fledgling Apple label into one of the most significant figures in the ’70s folk movement, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2022 documentary (Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name)that gives Taylor and King full focus? Probably not.

Ronstadt is a guarded, but appreciative interview subject, and if you’re interested in her growth from eclectic vocalist with a reputation for being “difficult” to one of the most versatile and beloved stars of the ’70s and ’80s, this is good stuff. Is it better than the 2019 documentary that gives Ronstadt full focus? Probably not. 

The stories of his production innovations and inspirations are nerdy and cool, especially the talk of Asher being one of the first producers to insist on giving back-of-the-album credit to the individual musicians assisting bigger solo artists. But the stories of wild tours, drug use and the like are strictly old hat. Asher’s eagerness to talk about the good times and his immediate reticence to engage on the disintegration of his first marriage (the topic of a James Taylor song, “Her Town Too”) made me wonder what else was being left out.

It’s also odd that after all of the depth given to Asher’s personal relationships with the Beatles and Taylor and Ronstadt, we reach the ’80s and ’90s and the documentary is pretty much, “And then he worked with Diana Ross and Cher and Neil Diamond and Billy Joel,” who are all absent from the documentary.

Everywhere Man simply falls victim to Asher living such a conventionally impressive life after having already lived several unconventionally remarkable lives. What a pity!