The Mastermind (Drama)

Rating:

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Producer: Vincent Savino,Anish Savjani,Neil Kopp
Screenwriter: Kelly Reichardt
Cinematographer: Christopher Blauvelt
Composer: Rob Mazurek
Editor: Kelly Reichardt
Production Designer: Anthony Gasparro
Key Cast: Bill Camp,Hope Davis,Sterling Thompson,Alana Haim,Gaby Hoffmann,Eli Gelb,Josh O'Connor,Jasper Thompson,Cole Doman,John Magaro

Josh O’Connor headlines indie icon Kelly Reichardt’s 1970s-set spin on the heist movie, a moving and wryly funny Cannes Competition highlight.

Aimless J.B. (Josh O’Connor, Rebuilding, MIFF 2025), a former art student who’s fallen on hard times as an out-of-work carpenter, has hatched a cunning plan: to steal a handful of paintings from a small museum outside of Boston. It may seem like a bad idea, but he’s got it all figured out … save for what to do with his kids while the theft is taking place, and what to do with the paintings once he has them.

Kelly Reichardt’s (First Cow, MIFF 2020) empathetic portraits of characters consigned to the fringes, from frontier times to present-day suburbia, have made her an icon of American independent cinema. Built around O’Connor’s remarkable portrayal of a hapless daydreamer carrying out a harebrained scheme, along with Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza) as his increasingly frustrated wife, and Gaby Hoffmann (Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus, MIFF 2015) and frequent Reichardt collaborator John Magaro (Showing Up, MIFF 2023) as old friends who offer refuge, The Mastermind is Reichardt’s most openly comedic work yet; but it’s also as artistically rigorous as anything she’s previously turned her camera to. Deftly undoing the cinematic clichés of the heist movie while also paying homage to the New Hollywood classics of the era in which the film is set – at the outset of the 1970s, with the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s presidency at their height – this Cannes-premiering tour de force conveys a national narrative in microcosm.

“The Mastermind may be a heist movie about a novice thief with a dumb plan. But Reichardt pulls it off like clockwork: This film is stupendously smart.” – RogerEbert.com


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