CURRENT EVENTS

Opening today:

The American Southwest--It's hardly breaking news that the American Southwest is full of breathtaking views. But The American Southwest, the generically-titled documentary opening here, is also full of breathtaking views. Written and directed by veteran nature photographer and filmmaker Ben Masters, the movie traces the route of the Colorado River from its source in the Rockies down through the Grand Canyon all the way to its now appallingly dry delta in Mexico.

The overarching point of the film is that humans have, in a very short time, screwed up this great waterway. "From its headwaters to the border, the Colorado is diverted, divided and dammed," says narrator Quannah Chasinghorse, in her measured, lulling tones. "Its water is impounded, evaporated and subjugated." We're also firmly reminded that "The seemingly limitless amount of snow [the source of the river's waters] is actually finite and quantifiable."

It's a compelling, even alarming message, and hopefully a call to arms, but happily The American Southwest isn't a downer to watch, partly because it isn't just gorgeous vistas; it has a lively cast of characters. Along the river's southerly route, Masters, working with partner organizations like American Rivers, Northern Jaguar Project and The Peregrine Fund, gives us passages of truly jaw-dropping wildlife footage.

We see beavers industriously creating their own dams; cuthroat trout struggling upstream to spawn like salmon; a young condor trying to get home after a tentative--and unintentional--early attempt at flight; jaguars marking their mating turfs. Some of these episodes have an amorous flavor: a hilariously frustrated, randy young elk tangling with a wily older rival; a romcom-like courtship between two Mojave rattlesnakes.

My favorite sequence depicted the lives of salmon-flies, swept downstream in their larval stage only to have to fly back upstream as adults to lay their eggs. The scenes of the larva, buffeted around helplessly by river currents beyond their control, may remind some of us of own lives.

Still in the multiplexes:

Caught Stealing--After trying to channel Elvis in 2022, Austin Butler played a beautiful love object with no discernible personality, on purpose, in 2023's The Bikeriders. It's nice to see him playing a guy, just a guy, in his latest, Caught Stealing. He has a nice sympathetic manner as a standard movie hero with a history in this blood-splattered crime yarn directed by Darren Aronofsky from a script by Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel.

Butler plays Hank, an East Village bartender in the late '90s. A functional alcoholic, Hank is haunted by a tragedy which ended his promising baseball career before it started. But he's not a bad sort. He talks by phone to his beloved mom every day as they follow their beloved San Francisco Giants; his sexy girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) is fascinated by him; and he agrees to cat-sit for his punky neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) when Russ tells him he has to go home to London for a family emergency.

This last kindness is what gets him in trouble; he soon finds himself targeted both by gangsters—Russian, Puerto Rican and Hasidic—and by the cops, in the form of an engaging NYPD detective (Regina King). Gruesome misadventures ensue, while Aronofsky evokes the period of mohawks and studded leather jackets and answering machines and pay phones and car cigarette lighters, and Shea Stadium.

The cast is strong, not just Butler, Kravitz, Smith and King but Griffin Dunne as Hank's boss and Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio, impressively underplaying the deceptively mensch-y Hasidic triggermen. Even Carol Kane turns up briefly, which is usually enough for a recommendation all by itself.

Caught Stealing is ultimately just standard mayhem from the Robert Rodriguez or Guy Ritchie playbook, and I suppose my investment in it was weakened a little every time a likable character got killed off. Butler kept me rooting for him until the end, however. So did the cat.