The Mastermind: Josh O’Connor stars in unconventional art heist movie

Writer-director Kelly Reichardt is “versatile” but also “consistent”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. Whether her films are about a homeless woman searching for her dog (“Wendy and Lucy”) or eco-activist saboteurs (“Night Moves”), they are all, one way or another, “about the American Condition”. Her latest one is set in Massachusetts at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War in 1970 – which are seen and heard in news footage throughout.

Josh O’Connor plays J.B. Mooney, an art-school drop-out who is married with children, and planning to rob a provincial art gallery in an effort to get rich, because his career is going nowhere. The robbery itself (“managed with fine-tuned suspense”) goes well enough. But Reichardt’s real interest is in the crime’s brooding aftermath. Of course, Mooney is not a mastermind – and things do not turn out well.

This is not a heist movie in the conventional sense, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. It is really “a character study of an unexceptional man who believes he is special” being slowly forced to contemplate his own mediocrity; the pathos is that J.B. could have had a perfectly good life, had he not tried to take a shortcut to success.

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Reichardt is the “queen of ‘slow cinema’”, said Ed Potton in The Times. Her film is beautifully shot, in an autumnal palette. And the “always-watchable” O’Connor is up with the best of them when it comes to “staring into the middle distance”; but Alana Haim is wasted as his wife, and even if no one would expect “white-knuckle thrills” from this director, I could have done with a bit more to engage with than the “vague hum of disappointment”. Reichardt’s fans will say it has hidden depths; some viewers may find them too hidden.