Critic Reviews

Like so much of Reichardt’s output, The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind.

Very possibly her most accessible and enjoyable film to date, still it remains an unmistakably Reichardtian investigation into the fabric of ordinariness and what happens when it frays.

Josh O’Connor is marvelous as this sputtering soul with no aptitude for illegality — or, frankly, anything else — as he drifts through an unremarkable life that’s slowly slipping through his fingers.

With The Mastermind, Reichardt has made a unique film, even amongst similarly cryptic genre exercises. . . I left the cinema gripped and unusually rattled.

A film so pure in its simplicity, relatable in its banality, quiet in its captivation, that it pulls off a nearly impossible feat: It’s a heist film that can’t be called a thriller.

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

Kelly Reichardt’s heist movie The Mastermind is crackingly, urgently alive, an assured and magnificent addition to an already storied body of work.

As is the case with much of Reichardt’s work, The Mastermind is a genre movie that zeroes in on a formula only to meticulously scrawl over it in jet-black ink.

Even before the thieves cross the building’s threshold, “The Mastermind” emerges as an instant heist classic. Reichardt’s granular view of the plot, clearly bound for disaster, is both terribly sad and absurdly funny.

The true audacity of The Mastermind may be Reichardt’s conception of J.B. himself, who not only lacks nobility or competence, but possesses a compelling vacancy that’s harder to unpack.