November 7
THE MASTERMIND(US, 2025) Regional Premiere!
The great auteur Kelly Reichardt (First Cow, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy), America’s most independent director, premiered her latest, The Mastermind, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival where it was nominated for its top award, the Palme d’Or.
In a sedate Massachusetts suburb circa 1970, we meet J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor), a mostly unemployed failed art student, a husband to Terri (Alana Haim) and a father to two young sons. His seemingly unremarkable existence, however, harbors a rather ambitious, if ill-conceived scheme: the robbery of a local art museum. The expectation that Reichardt may be working within genre cinema is quickly dispelled when the film signals its departure from the crisp precision of a typical heist narrative; it’s less about the action and more about the character undertaking it, a slow burn examination of a man unequal to his own designs, reflected in the irony of the film’s title. The Mastermind continues to explore themes that have run throughout Reichardt’s remarkable career: characters coping with financial insecurity and how it shapes their choices, American lives defined by compromise, loss, and unrealized ambitions (Reviews on Reels). The film also features Gaby Hoffmann, John Magaro, Hope Davis and Bill Camp. 110 minutes.
“If you’ve seen Kelly Reichardt’s versions of a frontier Western and of an ecoterrorist thriller, you may know what to expect from her take on an art-heist movie: an exquisite groundedness, in which no detail or texture can be too precise.” The New Yorker
“The Mastermind may be a heist movie about a novice thief with a dumb plan. But Reichardt pulls it off like clockwork: This film is stupendously smart.” RogerEbert.com
“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.” New York Magazine
“Reichardt’s quietly fantastic The Mastermind is hardly moralistic, but it is a gentle, cautionary hand-on-the-arm for ordinary men who believe they are somehow entitled to more than the everyday blessings of home and family.” Variety
“Jauntier than any of Kelly Reichardt’s previous work, The Mastermind packs an ironic punch.” The Wrap
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