The Mastermind

Kelly Reichardt: The Mastermind (US 2025). Josh O'Connor (James Blaine Mooney)

    US © 2025 Mastermind Movie Inc. Sociétés de production : FilmScience, MUBI et UTA Independent Film Group. Production : Neil Kopp, Vincent Savino, Anish Savjani et Sam Tischler.

Réalisation et scénario : Kelly Reichardt

Photographie : Christopher Blauvelt - 16 mm - colour - 1.66:1

Direction artistique : N/A

Décors : Anthony Gasparro

Costumes : Amy Roth

Musique : Rob Mazurek

Montage : Kelly Reichardt

    Distribution

Josh O'Connor : James Blaine Mooney

Alana Haim : Terri Mooney

John Magaro : Fred

Hope Davis : Sarah Mooney

Bill Camp : Bill Mooney

Gaby Hoffmann : Maude

Eli Gelb

Cole Doman

Javion Allen

Matthew Maher

Rehnzy Feliz

    Paintings: Arthur Dove (1880-1946).

    Loc: Cincinnati, Hamilton, Middletown (Ohio) - Columbus, Cleo Rogers Memorial Library (Columbus, Indiana).

    Durée : 110 minutes

    Genre : drame, casse

    Sociétés de distribution : MUBI (Monde) ; Condor Distribution (France)

    Dates de sortie :

France : 23 mai 2025 (Festival de Cannes 2025) ; 4 février 2026 (sortie nationale)

US : 29 Aug 2025 (Telluride Film Festival) ; 17 Oct 2025 (sortie nationale)

    Vu samedi, le 7 février 2026, MK2 Bastille (Côté Fg Saint-Antoine), 5 faubourg Saint-Antoine, Paris 11e

Official storyline: "In a sedate corner of Massachusetts circa 1970, JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) an unemployed carpenter turned amateur art thief, plans his first big heist. When things go haywire, his life unravels."

Mara Fortes (Telluride Film Festival 2025): "The self-absorbed J. B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is an occasional carpenter and former art student in a sleepy Massachusetts town; his wife (Alana Haim) is the family’s dependable parent and breadwinner. In a stroke of hubris, he decides to recruit a pair of unreliable partners to rob the local museum. But he doesn’t plan for after the heist—and it’s the aftermath of the bungled scheme that’s the focus of Reichardt’s quietly subversive, often incisively funny and masterfully observed film. O’Connor is stellar as the inscrutable Mooney, cinema’s most unhurried man-on-the-lam. As he drifts unsteadily west, the country is shaking on its tilt: in the background, students galvanize in anti-war protests and the streets buzz with civil unrest. The tumult of the ‘70s permeates the airwaves and seeps through Reichardt’s careful compositions, and Rob Mazurek’s percussive jazzy score perfectly modulates the film’s darkly comic beats and richly textured moods." –Mara Fortes (U.S., 2025, 110m) In person: Kelly Reichardt, Josh O’Connor

Cannes Film Festival, Official Selection website: Manon Durand: A look back at the Cannes premiere on 4.2.2026: "For her second film presented in Competition, American director Kelly Reichardt directs Josh O’Connor for the first time in The Mastermind. In this heist film, the director of First Cow leaves her beloved Oregon behind to film in 1970s Massachusetts. A new unexpected theme that is once again a testament to the author’s eclectic range."

"Josh O’Connor plays J. B. Mooney, an unemployed carpenter who reinvents himself as an amateur art thief. Set against the turbulent backdrop of 1970s America, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the women’s liberation movement, the young man plans his first big heist yet. When things go haywire, his life unravels."

"Alongside the British actor — who also made an appearance on the Croisette this year for his role in the queer romance The History of Sound by Oliver Hermanus — we have the pleasure of seeing the lovely Alana Haim, who made her debut in Licorice Pizza by Paul Thomas Anderson four years ago, and whom we haven’t seen since. Both actors are featured for the first time under the direction of Kelly Reichardt, like the actress Hope Davis, who also walked the Red Carpet this year for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme."

"This heist drama has enough to pique the curiosity of Kelly Reichardt fans as it basically is a true departure from her usual minimalist and bucolic style. Already selected for Un Certain Regard in 2008 for the moving Wendy and Lucy, and in Competition in 2022 with Showing Up, — both showcasing the iconic Michelle Williams — Kelly Reichardt was also a member of the 2019 Feature Films Jury. Her filmmaking explores the American experience from a gentle and poetic perspective and often takes a particular interest in working-class characters living in small-town communities — reminiscent of Sean Baker’s sensibility." (Cannes Film Festival, Official Selection, a look back by Manon Durand)

AA: The title of Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind is ironic. The legacy of the heist film, including John Huston, Jules Dassin, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Pierre Melville and Michael Mann, is implicit, only to be ignored by Reichardt, who does not even turn to parody such as Mario Monicelli's I soliti ignoti / Big Deal on Madonna Street, or comedy, such as the caper films of Laurel and Hardy.

Instead of building suspense or comedy, Reichard defuses both. The approach is anti-dramatic in the extreme in this evocation of small town America in 1970. The epochal social turmoil of the age appears as background noise until the finale in which J. M. Mooney tries to hide in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration, only to be caught there by the police. There is a connection with Charles Chaplin in Modern Times.

Josh O'Connor as Mooney creates a portrait of a sleepwalker in his time and age, in his family and his own life. It is a study of a lack of awareness and self-awareness. In a time of drop-outs and counterculture, Mooney cannot even be registered as belonging with them. As the brains of the art heist, he fails unspectacularly at every stage, and Reichardt refrains from dramatic punches in those stages. 

As narrative cinema, The Mastermind is unusual. As visual art, as well. Shot on 16 mm film, there is a watercolour quality in Christopher Blauvelt's autumnal colour palette, with an emphasis on gray and brown, soft, blurred hues.

Rob Mazurek, a master of experimental jazz of the Chicago Underground, debuts as a film composer.  His relaxed sound world, with Latin American touches, is further countermeasure to the expectations of a thriller plot. Silences count as much as sounds, the music connects with interiority while the imagery shows our living in the material world.

Josh the loser and failed architect, tries to shape up for his family, both his own and his paternal one, but the humiliation only gets worse. The desperate attempt to reverse the situation with crime reminds me of Roofman, the audience-pleasing genre film.

The portrait of the art museum is realistic. Arthur Dove (1880-1946) was the first American abstract painter, but not a hot ticket in the early 1970s. The art museum is fictional, but the story is based on a real robbery. Kelly Reichardt had been long fascinated with art thefts and surprised to discover how relatively easy it was to steal art, even by Gauguin, Picasso and Rembrandt, at the time. Against this background, Josh's failure seems even more dismal.