The Mastermind: Kelly Reichardt pulls off a perfect slow heist movie

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Heist movies run on the mechanics of escape and the thrill of getting away with it, but Kelly Reichardt’s latest detoured story brilliantly turns the genre on its head. In her 1970s-set film The Mastermind, 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.  

JB (Josh O’Connor) is not your usual stylish antihero with clockwork timing: he’s a father of two, the son of a judge, and an under-employed carpenter by trade. The project of robbing a local museum (a favourite of his own family) occupies him like a new hobby, and his banal background initially fosters an oddball mystique as he cases the joint and pockets a miniature statuette on a trial run. Does he lead a double life as a criminal genius? Is he sticking it to the system in a disillusioned era? As an actor, the scruffily sly O’Connor looks primed to let us in on some secret as Rob Mazurek’s jazzy score sizzles along. 

But the steps in JB’s grand plan keep wobbling, with an underplayed humour that keeps the film from tilting into easy-to-digest bumbling. His two accomplices shortly demonstrate that they’re barely up to the job, and the aftermath becomes the story, from hiding the subtly wrought Arthur Dove paintings to going underground. Reichardt’s typically lovely casting rounds out the comfortable middle-class family observing his predicament: Alana Haim as his wife Terri, Bill Camp as his undermining father, and Hope Davis as his indulgent mother, plus two kids he basically sets aside when the heist calls. (Hilariously, JB’s father criticises the heist even when he doesn’t know his son’s involved: such a theft is “not worth the trouble,” he declares.)  

The key word is “comfortable,” almost blandly so, since the robbery clearly seems to be JB’s bid for attaining any distinction at all and maybe rebelling (though he’s not above dropping his father’s name in a jam). Our initial presumption of an antihero who has merely misstepped leads naturally into a safe-house stay with an old friend, Fred (certified Reichardt company player John Magaro), whose withdrawal to the countryside might, in another film, signal some principled disengagement from establishment society. But crucially Fred’s wife (Gaby Hoffmann) isn’t buying JB’s whole deal, sniffing out something shabby in his self-inflicted plight. 

News keeps percolating in from the world at large in the form of dispatches from the ongoing Vietnam War and protests in the streets. Reichardt trickles these images and sounds in (no ham-handed Post-1960s Montage here) as part of life in America at the time – in a way, another aspect of the film’s organic sense of period detail, from the pale blues and institutional yellows to the crankable car windows and push-knob cigarette vending machines. But significantly, these protests feel absent from JB’s mind, which is perhaps not wholly unusual but grows a little glaring considering the self-indulgent nature of his endeavour. At the risk of sounding like one of JB’s parents: what exactly is he doing with his life? 

Not that Reichardt’s tone ever gets close to moralising or judgmental (even as the film’s title sounds increasingly ironic). She retains her genius for slowly but surely shifting a film’s course until it’s become something else again, subtly leaving us space to reevaluate what we might have thought of JB and his maverick path. It’s not unlike her eco-terrorism drama Night Moves (2013) in this movement, but definitely more successful. At one point she crystallises the limits of JB’s world and worldview with a 360-degree pan of his hotel room as he forges a passport: it begins and ends with him alone. 

Reichardt has said she was inspired by a 1972 heist of the Worcester Art Museum (in another town in Massachusetts), and when the film begins, my impulse was, perhaps glibly, to see a parallel between art-heisting and filmmaking: get in, get your pictures, get out. But the concerns of The Mastermind run to other depths, very much conditioned by our current era, when moral dilemmas and the imperative to do anything more than stand by have reached an unignorable pitch. JB’s character comes out with a sinking clarity when push comes to shove, and before you know it – maybe like a heist in reverse – Reichardt has come and gone, leaving you with something invaluable to gaze upon and reflect.