In 1970, failed architect James Blaine Mooney and cohorts wander into a museum in broad daylight and steal four paintings. When holding onto the art proves more difficult than stealing them, Mooney is relegated to a life on the run.

Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, ‘The Mastermind’, drifts into view like a film that’s genuinely been unearthed from the 1970s rather than made in 2025. Set in that era of shifting ideals and uneasy politics, it follows Josh O’Connor as a low-level schemer whose latest ambition — an art heist of questionable logic and even more questionable planning — becomes the loose spine of the story. It’s a heist movie, technically, but one that barely seems interested in the mechanics of a heist; it’s far more absorbed in the man at the centre, the environment he lives in, and the world he doesn’t fully understand.

What’s striking from the outset is just how vintage the whole thing looks and feels. The grain, the colour palette, the mellow pacing — all of it evokes the cinema of the period, and particularly the cool detachment of someone like Jean-Pierre Melville, who I watched a fair bit of during the pandemic. O’Connor is well cast in the central role of J.B. , and he is well suited for playing these blank slates who feel as if they’ve walked in from a different era (see also ‘La Chimera’). What is really going through his mind? It’s never quite clear and that’s largely the point. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War rumbles along in the background, only half-registering for him, because he’s far too wrapped up in his own minor machinations to comprehend the larger world burning around him.

For all the style and atmosphere, impressively constructed, I found myself struggling to fully sink into it. The deliberate pacing edges into dare I say a bit slow, and the narrative ambles rather than escalates, never quite getting towards the intriguing denouements it keeps hinting toward. It’s a film of gestures and moods more than movement, and while that’s part of the intention, it also leaves stretches feeling frustratingly inert. That said, the final scene is great — the one moment where everything Reichardt is working towards come together in a neater fashion than the film up to this point.

‘The Mastermind’ has its merits: strong craft, a wonderfully textured sense of time and place, and a central performance pitched perfectly to its 70s influences, but for me, it never quite came alive in the way I hoped it would.

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: Kelly Reichardt

Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffmann and Bill Camp

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt33455099/