"One of the joys of reviewing movies is witnessing a longtime filmmaker's artistic breakthrough, as has happened with Kelly Reichardt. A serious director with a principled world view, she formerly eschewed style and flair as if they were sins, narrowing her aesthetic to fit the points of view that she conveyed in each film. But with " Showing Up," from 2022, she displayed, for the first time, uninhibited cinematic pleasure, an unabashed delight in inventive observation and gratuitous beauty."
""The Mastermind" is another art-world story-sort of. It's set in 1970, mainly in Framingham, Massachusetts, where James Blaine Mooney (Josh O'Connor), called J.B., is an artisan manqué-a cabinetmaker who's out of work and whose lofty sense of his own craft may be the reason why. He lives with his wife, Terri (Alana Haim), the family breadwinner, who works behind a typewriter in an office, and their two idiosyncratic sons, seemingly just either side of ten, Tommy (Jasper Thompson) and Carl (Sterling Thompson)."
Kelly Reichardt expands her aesthetic range in a bold genre reimagining that combines dramatic, aesthetic, geographical, historical, and ethical shifts. The film, set mainly in 1970 Framingham, Massachusetts, follows James Blaine Mooney (Josh O'Connor), an unemployed cabinetmaker called J.B., his wife Terri (Alana Haim), and their two sons. J.B.'s pilfering of a museum figurine during a family visit initiates a crime-and-escape narrative infused with art-world concerns. The film balances political conflict and existential comedy while delighting in inventive observation and gratuitous beauty. Reichardt stages one of the freest reworkings of genre and subtly unhinges conventional movie narrative.
Read at The New Yorker
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