‘The Mastermind’ Review — Josh O’Connor anchors an arthouse art heist

I saw Kelly Reichardt’s new film The Mastermind at an AMC last night. It showed early as part of their “Screen Unseen” film series, a marketing gimmick where they don’t tell you what upcoming movie you’ll see when you buy the ticket. I live in Los Angeles, though, and there are some helpful East Coast folk who’ll spoil things if you know where to look online. In other words, I knew what I was walking into; many of my fellow moviegoers, it seems, did not. There were many walkouts. A guy in my row snored loudly for like fifteen minutes somewhere in the middle. There was much audible consternation when the credits rolled.

Great film!

Reichardt’s films aren’t exactly known for being crowdpleasers anyway. She loves to take her time playing around with time, encouraging audiences to sit with characters as they merely exist, making movies out of the stretches of life that other people would likely just cut right past to keep things exciting. That doesn’t work for everyone, but with the right mindset, The Mastermind is a great experiment; it’s sort of an inverted heist movie, one more about the waiting and the boredom than the action that most movies would focus on.