evanston_dad

Josh O'Connor plays a bungling husband and father who orchestrates the heist of four valuable paintings from a small art museum and then runs for it when it all goes wrong.

Though the title of the film is "The Mastermind," O'Connor's character is far from it. He really can't do anything right, and the movie is the sad study of someone who's done in by his own ineptness. The movie is set during the Vietnam War, and the constant reminder of activism and social unrest unfolding in the background brings his selfishness and indifference to the world around him into even starker relief.

O'Connor's character isn't remotely sympathetic, which is fine, but more problematic is that the screenplay doesn't create much of a character out of him. We don't know anything about him, and only see him abandoning his wife and kids in the pursuit of money that he doesn't even get. It's hard to care about such an anonymous loser.

The film doesn't really seem to have much of a point, but it's weirdly compelling anyway. It's full of moments (like excruciatingly slow 360 pans around an empty room) that make you wonder what director Kelly Reichardt has on her mind, but it's very watchable. And it's capped off by a dark joke of an ending that's the best thing about the movie.

Grade: A-

I saw the movie "Missing" for the first time not that long ago. It was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar back in 1982 and is about a military coup in Chile and the search for a missing American that gets tangled up in the corruption of the Chilean and American governments and authorities.

"The Secret Agent" tells a very different story from "Missing," but because I had seen that movie recently I was thinking of it while watching this one. "The Secret Agent" is also set in a South American country, Brazil in this story, and it's also about how an innocent person gets trapped in the country because of the rampant corruption and the lack of reliable governance. Wagner Moura plays a man in witness protection trying to flee with his son, but in 1977 Brazil, witness protection was a grass roots operation not given any federal support, so it's basically a cat and mouse game to try to get out of the country before hired goons find him and kill him. All sorts of people are willing to be paid off, cops included.

I'm not really sure who the secret agent of the title is supposed to be, unless it's an all-encompassing term meant to apply to any number of characters who are involved in their own private missions, most of them nefarious. The movie is being categorized as a thriller, and there are very suspenseful moments, but I'm not sure that's what it is first and foremost. It's more a slow-burn drama about people adrift in a system that seems intent on destroying them.

Moura is quite good in the lead role, playing both the main character and then the grown up version of the main character's son in a final segment.

Grade: A.

Heist movies are a dime a dozen, but "The Hot Rock" stands out a bit from the masses because it's not about one big heist, but rather a bunch of small heists.

The first one relieves a valuable jewel from a museum, but then the jewel ends up in a police station and the gang has to steal it from there, and THEN the jewel ends up in a safety deposit box so they have to steal it from there. And THEN the movie just kind of ends, as if everyone involved ran out of ideas for another place the jewel could end up at.

For a movie all about tense robberies, this one is relaxed and laid back in the extreme. A game cast led by Robert Redford makes sure things go down smoothly, and this leans more into screwball comedy than it does grungy, gritty 1970s aesthetics.

Randomly nominated for a film editing Oscar in 1972.

Grade: B+