A film about an audacious art heist? Inside The Mastermind, the timeliest movie ever

"The term cosy crime describes the reassuring, cardigan-swaddled whodunnits that currently dominate both page and screen, but it carries different connotations for Kelly Reichardt, director of the new heist movie The Mastermind, as it surely must for anyone from a law enforcement family. Reichardt's mother was an undercover narcotics agent, her father a crime scene detective. When the couple split up, she also gained an FBI agent as a stepfather."

"During weekends with her dad, who moved into a house with four other recently divorced colleagues, she would sometimes be given mysteries to solve, like some kind of junior Thursday Murder Club. It sounds really cute, says the 5ft-tall, 61-year-old director, whose film could not feel more timely, given the Louvre heist. But I was only young, and I'd often wait for him at his office where there were these big horrific images on the walls."

"It's no coincidence, then, that several of Reichardt's movies have engaged with crime, from her 1994 debut River of Grass, in which two lovers go half-heartedly on the run after wrongly believing themselves to be murderers, to 2013's Night Moves, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning as ecowarriors who blow up a dam. Her enchanting 2019 masterpiece First Cow hinges on the most low-key heist imaginable: two early-19th century entrepreneurs stealing milk by moonlight for their fledgling doughnut business."

Kelly Reichardt grew up immersed in law enforcement: her mother worked undercover in narcotics, her father was a crime-scene detective, and a stepfather served as an FBI agent. Childhood weekends included puzzles and staged mysteries while exposure to graphic crime-scene images left a lasting impression. Reichardt repeatedly returns to crime themes across her films, from 1994's River of Grass and 2013's Night Moves to 2019's First Cow, which centers on a low-key milk-theft heist. The Mastermind, set in 1970 Massachusetts and starring Josh O'Connor as JB Mooney, stages a more traditional art robbery amid contemporary high-profile thefts.

Read at www.theguardian.com