Metacritic reviews

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.

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.

The dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.

Reichardt has made a genre picture that peels away all the usual tropes to focus on character, on human failings and on the reality that even someone from a comfortable middle-class background can be worn down by struggle and reach for unwise solutions.

The Mastermind is a study in one man’s selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick.

After the novelistic strengths of First Cow and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt turns in something here that’s more like a short story – unhurried, pleasurable, and low key.

Unfolding at the American filmmaker’s measured tempo, it’s more droll than LOL-funny, though there are some big laughs along the way.

The Mastermind vascillates between wanting to lean into the thrills of a heist and falling back on Reichardt's tried-and-true formula. The result is a confusing mix of tones with a fairly basic concept that rarely dips below the surface.

This being Reichardt, white-knuckle thrills were unlikely to be on the menu either, but you would have hoped for something to engage with beyond a vague hum of disappointment.