The Mastermind
Josh O'Connor botches an art heist in Kelly Reichardt's quietly subversive dark comedy, with the tumult of the 1970s buzzing in the background.
The self-absorbed J.B. Mooney (Josh O'Connor) is an occasional carpenter and former art student in a sleepy Massachusetts town in the 1970s. His wife (Alana Haim) is the family's dependable parent and breadwinner. In a stroke of hubris, he decides to recruit a pair of unreliable partners to rob the local museum—but he has no plan for what comes next. It's the aftermath of the bungled scheme that's the focus of Kelly Reichardt's quietly subversive, often incisively funny and masterfully observed film.
Our unhurried man-on-the-lam drifts unsteadily west toward a reliable friend (John Magaro, also from Reichardt's First Cow), and on his way encounters students galvanized in anti-war protests and the streets abuzz with civil unrest. The tumult of the 1970s seeps through Reichardt's careful compositions, offering a commentary on how current politics step into the foreground of our lives and invite us to engage in something greater than ourselves—and how some of us miss that moment, wrapped up in our own (failed) schemes.
D: Kelly Reichardt, US, 2025, 1h50m, Closed Captions
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