When you think about it, it’s wild that you can just stand feet from a van Gogh at the Museum of Modern Art with nothing but a wire, a guard, and the social contract keeping you from doing anything rash. The risk of leaving artworks so exposed is the tradeoff of letting everyone appreciate them, rather than putting them in a vault or a wealthy person’s compound. That tension is at the heart of Kelly Reichardt’s new highly idiosyncratic art heist film The Mastermind (2025), soon screening as part of this year’s New York Film Festival before opening in theaters on October 17.
The thing about art theft is that, contra its sexy, intrigue-heavy portrayal in films like The Thomas Crown Affair or Entrapment (both 1999), it actually tends to not be that complicated. A lot of the time, you can just yoink a painting off the wall and run. (My editor advised me to stress that this is in no way a suggestion.) In 1972, some guys held up the Worcester Art Museum and made off with a Picasso, two Gauguins, and a piece from Rembrandt’s studio. The pinnacle of such crimes is, of course, the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, which two dudes pulled off not by dodging laser alarms or cracking complex locks, but simply tricking the guards by posing as cops. The tradition continues to this day; Reichardt teaches at Bard, and just last year, a biology student there tried to make off with two paintings before being hunted down with a police drone. (He was banned from campus but “allowed to finish his coursework remotely.”)
Film still of The Mastermind (2025), directed by Kelly Reichardt
These kinds of blue-collar art thefts were Reichardt’s inspiration for the plot of the film. When JB (Josh O’Connor, playing an art criminal for the second time in as many years) and some compatriots decide to rob their local museum, they don’t plot anything terribly elaborate — they’ll nab a few Arthur Dove paintings, run past the always-asleep guard, and drive off in a waiting stolen car. Yet even this simple crime in the sleepy Massachusetts town of Framingham in the early 1970s runs into unforeseen snags and consequences. Reichardt has described The Mastermind as “an aftermath film, an unraveling film,” and the way JB spirals — embarking on one of the more pathetic fugitive runs I’ve ever seen in the heist genre — makes the title increasingly ironic.
Reichardt is one of the cannier cinematic chroniclers of United States history, with each of her period pieces in some way undermining myths, like the masculine frontiersman in Meek’s Cutoff (2011) or First Cow (2019). The Mastermind is not situated in the ’70s as mere affectation. This was just after the golden age of municipal institutions amid postwar economic prosperity. Innumerable smaller cities and towns got beautiful new libraries, city halls, and museums. In real life, Framingham didn’t yet have an art museum at the time, so the production used a perfect example of such architecture — the I. M. Pei-designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, with its beautiful brickwork — as its exterior stand-in.
Film still of The Mastermind (2025), directed by Kelly Reichardt
The choice of art to target — Dove’s “Tree Forms” (1932), “Willow Tree” (1937), “Tanks & Snowbanks” (1938), and “Yellow Blue Green Brown” (1941) — is also deliberate. Dove was a modernist and is sometimes called the first American abstract painter. When news of the heist breaks, JB’s father expresses befuddlement at all the fuss, because he can’t see why anyone cared about these drawings in the first place. That’s a signpost of the conservative turn of the era, and the movie only deepens in post-’60s malaise as it goes.
Reichardt often follows protagonists unmoored from society, whether they’re the settlers of Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow or the drifter in Wendy and Lucy (2008). In The Mastermind, JB becomes lost in something much scarier than the wilderness: Nixon’s America. Conversations with other characters reveal that he’s a former art student dissatisfied with his everyday suburban existence, the kind of stultifying middle-class lifestyle constructed for millions after World War II. But it turns out there are worse things than a spiritually empty family life. Amid crackdowns on antiwar protests, and friends and comrades who either have no time for him or sell him out in a heartbeat, JB learns the hard way that, with the spirit of the ’60s well and truly dead, the establishment ethos that’s replaced it is far more hostile and alienating.
The Mastermind, directed by Kelly Reichardt, will be showing in the New York Film Festival from September 27 to October 23, and the film opens in theaters on October 17.
