"Her shaggy, '70s-set film starring Josh O'Connor as the orchestrator of an art museum robbery gone wrong, channels the kind of shaggy '70s capers that defined the genre - without any of the sleek, satisfying results of a heist flick. Instead, The Mastermind feels more true to the sinuous core of '70s neo-noir like Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye: meandering, pensive, and melancholy."
"The first thing you need to know about The Mastermind is that its title is ironic. Josh O'Connor's James Blaine Mooney may, in fact, be uniquely terrible at being a criminal. A suburban dad and an architect between jobs, he spends his time with his wife (Alana Haim) and two boys wandering the local art museum, where he swipes little trinkets and observes the sleeping security guards."
"Things only go downhill from there, as James is forced to step in as the getaway driver for the scheme, while the two other robbers rush through the sleepy museum and pack away the four paintings - all in broad daylight. That's the innovation of James' plan: that the sleepy Massachusetts museum is so ill-guarded that no one would notice a couple of robbers just walking out of the museum with paintings in tow."
Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is a '70s-set anti-heist film that favors melancholy neo-noir mood over slick thrills. James Blaine Mooney, a suburban dad and unemployed architect, cases a local art museum while maintaining family life, stealing small trinkets and studying guards. He assembles a ragged crew to steal four Dove paintings, recruiting a volatile criminal, Ronnie, after another member bails. The plan relies on a lax Massachusetts museum and daylight audacity, but Ronnie's escalation—pulling a gun on schoolgirls—collapses the scheme, forcing James into a doomed getaway role and exposing his incompetence as a criminal.
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