A perfectly rumpled Josh O’Connor’s criminal ambitions go awry in Kelly Reichardt’s arthouse art-heist film showcasing the American master of cinematic minimalism at her absolute best.
The fallout from the mediocre robbery of a minor-league museum leads to a steadily deepening character study that ruminates on what’s really at stake, and who exactly we’re rooting for.
The Mastermind 2025
“The abject non-hero of Kelly Reichardt’s engrossingly downbeat heist movie, set in 1970s Massachusetts, is weak, vain and utterly clueless. By the end, he’s a weirdly Updikean figure, though without the self-awareness: going on the run with no money and without a change of clothes, to escape from the grotesque mess he has made for himself and his family.
James, played with hangdog near-charm by Josh O’Connor; is an art school dropout and would-be architectural designer… Having established the lax security measures at a local art gallery, he plans to pay two tough guys and a getaway driver to steal four paintings by American artist Arthur Dove and hide them at a nearby farmhouse...
Obviously, you wouldn’t expect the quietist, realist movie art of Kelly Reichardt to give us anything like Ocean’s Eleven or Reservoir Dogs. But the very fact of its ostentatiously unadorned reality makes the extraordinary events real and startling, shot, as always with Reichardt, with an earth-tones colour palette in a cold, clear daylight in her unflavoured, unaccented style… Reichardt has unerringly located the unglamour in the heist.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian