Kelly Reichard Pulls Off Another Quiet Heist with The Mastermind

It usually looks like fun in the movies. True of many things, but particularly stealing; pulling off a risky public theft would probably leave most people a nervous wreck, less Danny Ocean than the guy who bails on the bank robbery almost immediately in Dog Day Afternoon. That accounts for the mischievous glimmer that J.B. (Josh O’Connor) maintains as he talks to Larry (Cole Doman) and Guy (Eli Gelb), sorting out the details of his plan to snatch several valuable paintings from the local art museum in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, playing this weekend at the New York Film Festival head of its October release.

J.B. is evidently unemployed, and as with so many movie heists, the plans give him a sense of purpose and accomplishment. It’s probably a bad sign, then, just how uncomplicated those plans are; he’s boosting paintings from an art museum in Framingham, Massachusetts, not exactly a high-security target. J.B. seems pleased to have thought this all through, casing the joint through his family’s trips to the museum. But his scheme amounts to going during the day, taking the paintings off the wall, preparing a getaway car that can be easily and anonymously abandoned after the robbery, and having a fence whose identity he smugly discloses to his compatriots. Despite all this, he’s kind of right; it is still exciting to watch the robbery come together. Reichardt has one of American cinema’s keenest eyes for details, though she’s not exactly using them in service of the heist itself; it’s more that she surveys J.B.’s surroundings, from the modest furnished basement where he makes his plans to the parking lots and storefronts of his hometown. She tells us plenty about who this guy is, without a lot of expositional conversation. In fact, in some scenes, J.B.’s wife Terri (Alana Haim) barely speaks at all.

Most Popular

Terri, J.B., and their young sons Carl (Sterling Thompson) and Tommy (Jasper Thompson) live modestly, scraping by despite J.B. not bringing any money – or throwing himself into parenting, for that matter. When he fails to realize that the boys have an administrative day off from school when he’s set aside time for the robbery, he hands them some money and turns them loose downtown. They then spring wildly toward … it’s not really clear, which makes the visual of them receding into the distance even funnier. They’re making a beeline for some kind of freedom, which is also what J.B. seems to be after. His parents Bill (Bill Camp) and Sara (Hope Davis) are more traditionally respectable and, as such, quietly disappointed in the grand tradition of parents who wonder why their son can’t simply get a job as good as some other guy they know.

Between their condescension and the infectious fun of planning a heist, it’s easy enough to miss (at least at first) what a genuine layabout J.B. is. O’Connor’s performance is key to this sneaky quality – he’s sheepishly easy to like – and also to J.B.’s eventual undoing. Anything in his heist plan that appears meticulous starts to look like the sidelong product of laziness – a stubborn refusal to engage with family or community. The Mastermind is set in 1970, during U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and Reichardt is careful not to frame J.B.’s plans as genuine rebellion or resistance to polite society. (It’s easy to imagine his parents talking about how no one wants to work anymore.) The writer-director, so frequently attuned to the logistical challenges of just getting by in America, sees a man primarily concerned with some extra boost, a cheat code that only involves asking his mom for a little bit of seed money. The slow-building fecklessness of the enterprise is stunning.

It’s also often quite funny, as has been the case with Reichardt’s last couple of pictures (previous New York Film Festival selections First Cow and Showing Up found laughs in different strains of desperation). As J.B.’s big job goes south, Reichardt doesn’t shy away from the seriousness of its consequences; it becomes increasingly clear that this isn’t the type of bumbling-criminals comedy where the hero will somehow pratfall into farcical absolution. But the film mines low-key humor from her unspoken observations of human nature – unsparing, but not cruel. When J.B. visits a couple of old friends (John Magaro and Gaby Hoffman), the husband-and-wife disconnect in how to deal with him is hilariously palpable.

Some of the movie’s little episodes bring to mind the Coen Brothers, whose more hapless or unlucky (or, occasionally, blatantly antisocial) heroes J.B. sometimes recalls. Reichardt is probably thought of as more austere than the Coens’ stylizations, and by comparison she probably is; a scene where J.B. hides stolen goods in a barn has a fixed-camera patience that boosts its suspense and its comedy about as quietly as possible. But describing her work in those terms undersells her command of every element of The Mastermind: the warmth of the 16mm cinematography and the precision of its framing; the art direction of every home, motel room, or farmhouse; the jazzy score by Rob Mazurek that becomes less jaunty and more atonal as the film goes on. The movie evokes retro genre coziness and unease in equal measure, one creeping up from beneath the other. J.B. gets himself caught in the middle: He doesn’t know how good he has it, and doesn’t know how bad it can get.

The Mastermind plays September 27 and 28 at the New York Film Festival.

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Writer: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Sterling Thompson, Jasper Thompson, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffman, Hope Davis, Bill Camp
Release Date: September 27, 2025 (New York Film Festival); October 17, 2025 (theatrical)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.