It’s ironic that The Mastermind arrives in cinemas in the very same week as the theft of £80m worth of jewels from the Louvre. Inevitably, there’s a certain flair to how the imagination plays out such real-life scenarios: black turtlenecks and aviators, mopeds speeding down Parisian alleyways to the cool hit of percussion, plans made underneath a harsh, interrogatory light. There’s a little Rififi and a little Steven Soderbergh there.
Yet Kelly Reichardt’s latest is, in a way, the anti-heist film – quiet but piercingly observant, as her films (First Cow and Certain Women among them) so often are, and entirely devoid of the expected rhythms, aside from Rob Mazurek’s excited, jazzy score.
