Crime Looks Smaller in Daylight

Read Time:6 Minute, 57 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
The Mastermind
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Genre: Crime, Drama, Comedy, Thriller
Year Released: 2025, 2026 Mubi Blu-ray
Runtime: 1h 50m
Director(s): Kelly Reichardt
Writer(s): Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, Bill Camp, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffmann, Sterling Thompson, Jasper Thompson
Where to Watch: available June 30, 2026, pre-order your copy here: www.moviesunlimited.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: THE MASTERMIND is a heist movie only if you’re willing to accept that most of the genre’s usual expectations have been removed from the room before the robbery begins. Kelly Reichardt isn’t interested in planning, thieves, execution, or the fantasy that crime can become an elegant expression of intelligence. Her version of the art theft movie is smaller, stranger, and more irritated by confidence. It follows a man who thinks he has found an answer to his life’s failures, only to prove that stealing the paintings might be the easiest part of the crime.

Josh O’Connor plays James Blaine Mooney, a struggling carpenter, failed architect, husband, father, and amateur criminal whose sense of entitlement outweighs his own strategy. He lives in the Boston outskirts in 1970, a place where class pressures, insecurity, and national unrest all sit close to the surface. Mooney decides that stealing four Arthur Dove paintings from a local museum will solve his money problems, and the plan’s almost absurd simplicity gives the film its bite. He borrows money from family to hire accomplices, drifts through the setup with more confidence than caution, and treats the heist less as a desperate act than as a belated correction to a life he believes should have gone better.

O’Connor is very good at making Mooney frustrating without turning him into a villain. He doesn’t play him as a criminal mastermind in disguise or as a lovable screwup who deserves a clean redemption arc. Mooney is evasive, selfish, soft-spoken, occasionally charming, and often pathetic in a way that feels uncomfortably recognizable. O’Connor gives him a slow, cautious intelligence, not enough to make him brilliant, but enough to make him dangerous to the people who keep extending him their patience. The performance understands that Mooney’s problem isn’t stupidity. It’s the belief that he should be able to improvise his way through consequences because he has always been given just enough room to do so.

That’s where THE MASTERMIND becomes more interesting than its premise suggests. Reichardt uses the heist as a test of character rather than a centerpiece. The theft has tension, but it doesn’t arrive with the excitement audiences might expect from the genre. There’s no sense that we’re watching people operate at the height of their skill. Instead, the museum robbery feels oddly vulnerable, almost embarrassingly so, because the people carrying it out seem only partially aware of how fragile the whole thing is. Reichardt’s humor comes from that gap between the image of cleverness and the reality of people trying to pull off something larger than they can handle.

The film’s second half is where it will undoubtedly divide people, and honestly, that makes sense. Once the paintings are taken, the movie becomes less about the robbery and more about the burden of possession. Mooney has the stolen art, but he doesn’t have a planned-out future. Reichardt lets the unknown become the point, which is effective but not always as gripping or dramatic. The movie wants the viewer to feel the drift after a bad decision, and sometimes that means sitting inside scenes that communicate aimlessness by becoming aimless themselves.

Reichardt has always been a filmmaker of observation, pauses, labor, gestures, and people who reveal themselves through what they avoid saying. THE MASTERMIND fits her body of work because it strips a genre down to human behavior and evasion. The pacing only becomes an issue when the film’s dryness starts to flatten the emotion rather than focus it. Mooney’s unraveling is cleverly conceived, but there are moments when he’s so closed off, so self-involved, that the movie risks becoming more of a concept than emotionally engaging.

Alana Haim gives the film a necessary counterweight as Terri Mooney, James’ wife, and the person stuck absorbing the daily cost of his failure. She doesn’t have the splashiest role, but her presence is crucial because she represents the life Mooney keeps treating as an inconvenience. Haim plays Terri with exhaustion, giving the sense of a woman who has already heard too many explanations and watched too many promises dissolve. The film could have given her more space, especially because the domestic fallout is one of its most compelling areas. Haim’s underplayed frustration makes an impression even when the script keeps her at a distance.

The 1970 setting matters beyond the clothes, cars, and production design, although the film’s period detail is on point. THE MASTERMIND takes place against the unrest of Vietnam-era America, and Reichardt keeps that turmoil near the margins rather than forcing it into the foreground. That decision is smart because it makes Mooney’s self-absorption more damning. While the country is wrestling with war, protest, power, and disillusionment, he’s consumed by his own private grievance. The contrast doesn’t turn the film into a lecture. It simply lets the world outside Mooney’s head remain bigger than he is.

THE MASTERMIND is easier to admire than to embrace. Its best ideas are clear, but its emotional pull is intentionally limited. Reichardt doesn’t want to flatter the viewer with suspense, and she doesn’t want to make Mooney more likable than he is. That choice has integrity, but it also means the film can feel remote. The ending lands with a grim appropriateness, yet it doesn’t produce the same devastation that Reichardt has achieved elsewhere. It trails off in a way that fits Mooney’s collapse, though part of me wanted the film to cut deeper before letting him fade away.

THE MASTERMIND works because it understands failure as more than a plot outcome. Failure is the subject, the texture, and the joke. Mooney fails as a husband, a father, an artist, a son, a thief, and the man he imagines himself to be. Reichardt doesn’t mock him, but she also doesn’t rescue him from judgment. She watches him walk into his own bad idea with the patience of someone who knows the real story begins after the crime.

THE MASTERMIND is a sharp, dry, funny, carefully made study of a man whose plan exposes how little he understands himself. It’s not one of Reichardt’s most emotionally rewarding films. Still, it’s a smart and distinctive one, carried by O’Connor’s embarrassing portrait of misplaced confidence and by a filmmaker more interested in the mess after the getaway than the thrill of getting away.

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