Sightlines · reception
How The Mastermind was received
2025 · Kelly Reichardt · The Mastermind on Sightlines
The arc
Premiered in competition at Cannes 2025 to a genuinely split room — walkouts-and-raves territory, with some critics calling it a triumph and others 'a story about nothing at all' — before settling into warm critical standing on its MUBI release that fall.
What’s debated
The perennial Reichardt fight, at maximum volume: is the deliberately deflating 'anti-heist' pacing the whole point, or did she finally make a film where nothing happens?
Its footprint
It cemented the running film-Twitter/Letterboxd joke about Josh O'Connor's scruffy-art-thief era — fresh off tomb-raiding in La Chimera, he's back stealing paintings — while Rob Mazurek's restless jazz score became the film's most argued-about feature.
Where it stands
Too new for verdicts, but it's already a slow-cinema litmus test and a favorite entry in the 'rank the Reichardts' conversation.
Did you know? The film was inspired by the real 1972 Worcester Art Museum robbery — reportedly the first US museum heist committed at gunpoint — though Reichardt swapped the stolen Picasso, Rembrandt and Gauguins for four Arthur Dove paintings and a fictional Framingham museum.
Named by the director
- Jean-Pierre Melville — Reichardt named Melville as the main reference point for heist cinema — the tradition she set out to subvert rather than honor.
- Le Cercle Rouge (1970) — She cited Melville's film directly, saying she wanted to undo its Delon-style cool-criminal heartthrob — 'these guys are actually such jerks.'