In a cinematic landscape preoccupied with noise and spectacle, Kelly Reichardt has built a three-decade career out of embracing the quiet. From 2008’s Wendy and Lucy and 2016’s Certain Women to 2019’s First Cow and 2023’s Showing Up , her intimate, character-driven films unfold in subtle gestures and profound silences, observing with deep empathy ordinary people on the margins of American society. Now, with Mubi’s The Mastermind , she turns toward an unexpected subject: an art heist in 1970 suburban Massachusetts.

True to form, Reichardt doesn’t deliver a slick caper. Instead, she transforms the genre into something soulful and subversive, a gently mesmerizing meditation on human folly, frustrated ambitions, and the fragile architecture of confidence and privilege. Josh O’Co

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