Unveiled in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, The Mastermind might yet be Reichardt’s most commercial vehicle, although up against her earlier films like Wendy and Lucy, First Cow and Certain Women, all delicate, nuanced and often slow-moving works, that’s hardly saying much.
When the film opens, he’s casing Framingham’s art museum, even lifting a small figurine from a glass display case while his kids lark around. However, the real plan he hatches is to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the building, along with his cohorts. The heist itself is both comical and shocking. Two of the gang, wearing stockings to disguise their features, sneak the paintings past a security guard, who seems to be forever dozing.
Things go awry when one, Ronnie (Javion Allen), pulls a gun on a teenage girl who encounters them. Thankfully, no bullets are fired, but suddenly this art theft takes on a deadly slant. Worse is to come as James’ plans to sell the paintings go disastrously wrong, while Gibson is caught for a bank robbery, immediately pointing the finger at James as the mastermind of the museum theft. James has little choice but to go on the run, leaving Terri and the kids at his parents’ house.
Typically of a Reichardt movie, not a great deal happens on the surface. There’s even a protracted sequence where James hides the paintings in a barn on a farm, painstakingly taking them up a ladder to a loft area, then lugging a wooden storage box up there. It seems to go on for an eternity, and Reichardt clearly wants it this way. Likewise, most of the drama is off-screen, such as the fight that James and Terri have, which causes a cut over his eye. We also never even see his father’s reaction to his son’s theft.
An on-form O’Connor reprises, to some degree, the role he played in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, as a man who robs antiquities. What is a pity is how underdeveloped Haim’s character is. The musician and star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, is sadly given little to do here (though she makes a fair fist of a thin role).
The Mastermind screened at the Cannes Film Festival 2025 but does not currently have a UK release date.
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