In Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind, Crime is a lost game

For the second time in three years, Cannes' competition ends with a film in which Josh O'Connor plays a shabby man from the late 20th century with a little knack for mastery. Follows (mentally or in any other way) Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera Is Kelly Reichardt's The mastermindAn experiment in shape that is so thorough and confident that even Robert Bresson valued it. Nobody expected the first raid film of the diverse director Ocean's 11But The mastermind Is still remarkably low for lightning. There is a jazzy score by Rob Mazurek and some with saving opening loans, but this is very a Reichardt joint: from the beautiful, sylvan landscapes and autumnal color palette to the patient, the observation tone, she suggests how art could have really been deprived in the early 1970s.

Whatever is the case The mastermind is invoiced as a new addition to the raid genre, as everyone has. Most important tropics are available: the uniquely focused leader, the formation of a team (hello, bearded David Krumwood), the hatch of a plan, the execution, the nervous moments in and around the escape car. I will be dead long before the world tires of these things, but Reichardt is not over to satisfy with dopamine hits. Like Bressons L'rgentPresent The mastermind bears the small dialogue for everyone who has seen Alana Haim's name on the occupation list Licorice pizzaAnd started counting the days until another turn. She is one of many beloved actors who are here, apart from O'Connor, without working much. Gabby Hoffman, John Magaro and Matthew Mayer have unforgettable moments, but their characters dangle under the threads.

O'Connor plays James Blaine: Patriarch of the Mooney family, husband of Terri (Haim) and father of two sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson), who do not seem to seem consciously how he in the family failures in the Framingham Museum of Art (filmed in the Pei's Cleo Rogers library in the Colonory in the Colonory -Bibliothek in the abundance in the Colebus library), which were rotated with a PEI -Total in the Colos memorial factory), only to go in the Colo library in the Colors memorial factory. The museum's lax security measures encourage Mooney, the son of a judge (the always formible Bill Camp) to slip a plan to steal four paintings by Arthur Dove, known as the first American surrealist. He rounds off a team with a loan of his mother (a watchful hope of Davis), to which the art school lies, and claims that the money should help with an proposed architectural project. We will later see how he violates the work in a Schweinesty (a remarkably extended sequence even according to your own standards of this film) and apparently has no plan of where you will go next. Most of it is treated in the first half hour, whereby Reichardt apparently is more interested in the realities of what comes next: How the local mob will react and Mooney will lead to a lack of planning.

When I watched the film on Friday, I was reminded of the moment The parallax view When Warren Beatty drove to Lax in his Ford Torino, he Birte Birte through a metal detector and on a commercial aircraft without ever producing a ticket. Such public trust or naivety was on the way out at the beginning of the 1970s, a feeling that Reichardt's film (in which the Vietnam War threatens) gives an unusual indictment and throws Mooney – the presence of his family and the future, which is at risk of his own vague persecution of God, knows what – in a still selfish light. Is there anything about the current state of the nation, a culture of self -interest, the loss of an ideal? Perhaps, although Reichardt gave the imagination with carelessness. The film gradually makes a resolution that combines a final loss of principles with public unrest and poetic justice.

With The mastermindReichardt made a unique film, even under similarly cryptic genre exercises. They are waiting and waiting for the moment of the Katharsis, the existential monologue in the third act, which will equip the actions of our dubious protagonist in a great, indescribable light – perhaps a statement about crime as a kind of performance art or vice versa. But even that is striking for his absence. Such senselessness will be alienated for a certain audience. I took the cinema and rattled unusually.

The mastermind Premiere at the Film Festival 2025 Cannes and is published by Mubi.