The Mastermind

Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind unfolds in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1970. James Blaine "J.B." Mooney (Josh O'Connor) is an unemployed carpenter from a comfortable family, a husband and father whose sense of his own capabilities has quietly outgrown his circumstances. Casing the local art museum with the patience of a man who has nothing else to fill his days, he fixes on four paintings by the American modernist Arthur Dove and assembles a crew of amateurs to take them.

The heist itself arrives early and without glamour. Reichardt is far less interested in the mechanics of the theft than in everything that follows: the calls that don't get returned, the money that doesn't materialize, the accomplices who were never as committed as J.B. assumed, and the slow discovery that stolen art is nearly impossible to convert into a life. Around the edges of the story, the Vietnam War plays on televisions and spills into street protests, a country coming apart in the background of one man's private unraveling.

Written and directed by Reichardt and premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, the film plays as an ironic deconstruction of the heist genre — a crime story stripped of cool, shot in warm 1970s tones, scored with restless jazz, and built around a protagonist whose confidence is his most dangerous asset.

Reichardt uses the heist — cinema's most reliable fantasy of competence — to tell a story about incompetence dressed up as destiny. J.B. Mooney is the mastermind only in his own estimation; the title is both his self-image and a sardonic joke, the sort of nickname inmates give the new guy whose sense of his abilities never matched reality.

Beneath that irony sits a harder argument about class and moral drift. J.B. isn't driven by desperation so much as by entitlement and boredom: the compromises, petty immorality and small greeds of a man who assumes the world owes him a shortcut. As his plan collapses, the film peels back his likability to reveal something colder underneath — being hapless does not make you harmless. The people he uses pay for his choices more than he does.

And by setting all this against 1970 America — Vietnam on the news, the draft, protest in the streets — Reichardt suggests a parallel between a nation blundering through a catastrophe it insisted it had planned, and one man convinced he has everything under control.

The sarcastic reading. The dominant critical interpretation treats the title as pure irony: J.B. is a "mastermind" only in the way prison nicknames are earned, and the film is a comedy of self-delusion played with a straight face. Under this reading, the movie is fundamentally funny — painful and funny in equal measure, as critics noted of O'Connor's performance.

The Mastermind arrived as a high-profile entry in Kelly Reichardt's long project of American minimalism — the same patient, unsentimental attention she brought to Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, First Cow and Showing Up, here aimed at a genre that normally runs on adrenaline. Competing for the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025, it was read by critics as an ironic deconstruction of the heist film, a corrective to the slickness of the Ocean's lineage and a deliberate inversion of Melville-style criminal cool.

Its 1970 setting placed it in conversation with a wave of contemporary films revisiting Vietnam-era America as a mirror for present-day drift. The film also landed as an art-world object in its own right: outlets covering the art press discussed its use of Arthur Dove and its dry, knowing portrait of how stolen art actually circulates — which is to say, badly.

Critically it was a success, holding a 90% approval rating from 155 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes with an average score of 7.5/10 (93% among top critics), with the site's consensus praising a "contemplative crime drama that glides along Josh O'Connor's effortless watchability and a sumptuously vintage aesthetic." Commercially it remained resolutely indie, earning about $2.1 million worldwide against a sub-$2 million budget, and it further consolidated O'Connor's run as the defining art-house leading man of the mid-2020s.

Critics and general audiences split notably. On Rotten Tomatoes the film registered 90% positive from 155 critic reviews (average 7.5/10) and 93% among top critics, while the audience score sat far lower, around 53% — a gap that maps almost exactly onto the film's deliberate withholding of genre pleasure.

Praised: Josh O'Connor's performance is the near-universal high point, described as the engine of the film — a man in arrested development played entirely straight, which is what makes him both painful and funny. Critics also singled out the sumptuously vintage 1970s aesthetic, Christopher Blauvelt's photography, Rob Mazurek's jazz score, and Reichardt's nerve in making a heist movie that refuses to be exciting.

Criticized: Viewers expecting a crime thriller found it meandering and anticlimactic; the word "slow" recurs in negative reactions, along with frustration that the protagonist remains opaque and that the story deliberately declines to build momentum after the theft. Some found the Vietnam material too muted to register as commentary.

Points of contention: whether the film's flatness is a sophisticated strategy or an evasion, and whether J.B.'s late-revealed unlikability is a payoff or simply leaves the audience stranded without anyone to hold onto.

Verdict: a critics' film in the truest sense — admired as a precise, dryly funny anti-heist and a showcase for O'Connor, but an acquired taste for anyone who came for the caper.