JOSH O'CONNOR WITH ARTHUR DOVES IN THE MASTERMIND Throwing away privilege for follyThis new film by Reichardt is one of her best and may be her most accessible. It is dominated by the excellent and now almost ubiquitous Josh O'Connor playing an amateur art thief in New England 1970 whose heist gets him into a mess, and while the heist is here, and everything is in witty, specific detail, it's the long aftermath that takes up most of the film. It's a fascinating watch and a whole new angle on a crime film.
Josh plays the well-off, lazy James Blaine Mooney, aka J.B. , the son of a socialite and a powerful local judge (played by Hope Davis and Bill Camp). His wife is played by Alana Haim (we see too little of her). J.B. is a thirtyish failed architect and art school dropout. They have ten-year-old twin sons. After visiting the local small museum J.B. decides to rob it. He settles on four paintings by early American abstract nature painter Arthur Dove - a. very interesting artist, by the way, but there's nothing about him.
One has the sense that J.B. hired three men to do the robbery for him not just because his family visits the museum often and he's too known - the robbers wear socks over their heads anyway - but simply because he doesn't want to get his hands dirty. That's where he goes wrong right off, because robbery is dirty, hard work and you have to do it. The driver bails - the first bad sign - and J.B. has to helm the getaway car. The two remaining robbers are clumsy and crude. One has an unplanned pistol he threatens a teenage girl with and has a scuffle with a guard on the way out. Even the trunk of the car is stuck.
Nonetheless the four Arthur Dove paintings, all the same size, get into J.B.'s hands and he stashes them in a hayloft. He shows his ability as a fine carpenter with this one thing: he builds a nice compartmented wooden box with a Japanese-style sliding closure for the paintings. Only it's hell getting it up to the hayloft, because it's too heavy to lift with the paintings in it. So it goes. The film is borderline comic; you are free to laugh. But it is serious too. This is not a comedy.
The theft is the front page story in the local Worcester, Mass. newspaper. Soon one of the robber-team talks, and men come calling, one of them a cop, the other an expert on art theft. J.B. wangles out of going in for questioning by suggesting his judge father would not like it. But from here on he must go on the lam. But not before he has had bigger criminals come along and take away the stolen paintings from him, advising him that when you do a heist, you don't hire a "wild card."
The movie and the protagonist change gears from here on. J.B. becomes almost a non-person. But first he hs to learn that he has no allies. He goes to visit Fred and Maude (John Magaro and Gaby Hoffman), a hippie couple and old art school friends who live in the countryside. As they share a joint, Fred, who has nothing more interesting to do than substitute at a local school, reports being amused and thrilled by the news of J.B.'s crime, but Maude privately tells him that he must leave next morning and not contact them again. Fred suggests J.B. hide out at a commune in Canada where his draft-dodging brother lives, but J.B. is too choosy and superior to accept this offer.
He instead takes a bus to Cleveland, where he knows someone else. What does he expect? Anyway, he finds nothing. He tries to assume another identity and is as inept at this as everything else, though perhaps he switches passports skillfully, just as he skilfully crafted the wooden box.
All this is not only increasingly tense, but rich to watch because of Reichardt's augmented craftsmanship in providing authentic Seventies atmosphere. As the tension of J.B.'s situation grows, so too does the throbbing excitement around him of the world outside, of war and political upheaval, of which he is oblivious. And the world is olivous of him - but not quite enough. He should have gone to Canada - or Argentina. In the event, this well-off posh boy hasn't even got bus fare to Toronto and his wife hangs up when he calls and asks her to wire money.
For some, this clumsy getaway feels too low-keyed and flat. But if you attend to the detail and follow along closely with J.B., it acquires the tension of the best thrillers, with a keen extra edge of irony. One of the year's best American films.
The Mastermind 110 min., premiered in competition at Cannes May 2025, and was included in over three dozen other international film festivals, including Sydney, Melbourne, Telluride, Busan, Zurich, New York, Rio, Bangkok, Mill Valley, Vancouver, Leiden, BFI London, Riga, Vienna, Tokyo, Taipei, and more. US theatrical release Oct. 17, 2025.
Metacritic rating: 80%.
JAVION ALLEN, JOSH O'CONNOR IN THE MASTERMIND