Latest news with #KellyReichardt
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Bust out the popcorn: What to watch at Sydney Film Festival
This story is part of the May 31 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. WATCH / Scene stealers Cinephiles, it's time to get those corn kernels a-poppin'. Over 12 days (June 4-15) and 13 venues, the Sydney Film Festival will be raising the curtain on 201 films from 70 countries, more than half of them Australian premieres (17 of them world debuts), many still wreathed in glory from recent screenings at Toronto, Sundance and Cannes. These include Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind ('70s art heist), starring Josh O'Connor, It Was Just an Accident (Iranian Jafar Panahi's reimagining of the road movie) and Cherien Dabis's All That's Left of You (sweeping Palestinian family saga). Expect a heavy sprinkling of stardust, too, namely Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck (Stephen King adaptation, starring Tom Hiddleston) and On Swift Horses (sizzling '50s love pickle with Daisy Edgar-Jones and leading man-of-the-hour Jacob Elordi). Other Aussies will be out in force, too; don't miss Slanted, by newbie filmmaker Amy Wang, and the jewel in the opening-night crown, Together (starring real-life double act Alison Brie and Dave Franco), by Michael Shanks. (Fret not, Victorians: the Melbourne International Film Festival kicks off on August 7; watch this space.) READ / The write stuff Deception, misappropriation, ethical dilemmas, ambition – I Want Everything, the debut novel from Australian writer Dominic Amerena (Summit Books; $35), has it all. When a down-on-his-luck writer spots an iconic literary recluse at his local pool, he can't believe his luck. He worms his way into her affections, persuading her to spill the beans on the true stories behind her two celebrated novels and let him write her biography, convinced it will make his name as a writer. First, though, he must put aside his moral scruples. A literary thriller as well as a takedown of book-industry pretensions, with a cracker of an ending. Nicole Abadee LISTEN / Back to life Jacob Haendel was handed a death sentence in 2017. Due to complications from his heroin addiction, he contracted a rare, progressive brain disease that kills anyone who gets it within six months. He deteriorated to the point where doctors thought he was brain-dead but, in fact, he was trapped in his body, fully conscious, despite the inability to speak, eat or move a muscle. He was in hell. And he became aware that his wife, who outwardly played the fiercely protective caregiver, was separating him from his family, planning to divorce him; she even announced his death on social media. Spoiler alert: he miraculously survives. In the podcast Blink, host Corinne Vien helps Haendel tell the remarkable tale of someone who lost his life and then clawed his way back. Barry Divola
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Bust out the popcorn: What to watch at Sydney Film Festival
This story is part of the May 31 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. WATCH / Scene stealers Cinephiles, it's time to get those corn kernels a-poppin'. Over 12 days (June 4-15) and 13 venues, the Sydney Film Festival will be raising the curtain on 201 films from 70 countries, more than half of them Australian premieres (17 of them world debuts), many still wreathed in glory from recent screenings at Toronto, Sundance and Cannes. These include Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind ('70s art heist), starring Josh O'Connor, It Was Just an Accident (Iranian Jafar Panahi's reimagining of the road movie) and Cherien Dabis's All That's Left of You (sweeping Palestinian family saga). Expect a heavy sprinkling of stardust, too, namely Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck (Stephen King adaptation, starring Tom Hiddleston) and On Swift Horses (sizzling '50s love pickle with Daisy Edgar-Jones and leading man-of-the-hour Jacob Elordi). Other Aussies will be out in force, too; don't miss Slanted, by newbie filmmaker Amy Wang, and the jewel in the opening-night crown, Together (starring real-life double act Alison Brie and Dave Franco), by Michael Shanks. (Fret not, Victorians: the Melbourne International Film Festival kicks off on August 7; watch this space.) READ / The write stuff Deception, misappropriation, ethical dilemmas, ambition – I Want Everything, the debut novel from Australian writer Dominic Amerena (Summit Books; $35), has it all. When a down-on-his-luck writer spots an iconic literary recluse at his local pool, he can't believe his luck. He worms his way into her affections, persuading her to spill the beans on the true stories behind her two celebrated novels and let him write her biography, convinced it will make his name as a writer. First, though, he must put aside his moral scruples. A literary thriller as well as a takedown of book-industry pretensions, with a cracker of an ending. Nicole Abadee LISTEN / Back to life Jacob Haendel was handed a death sentence in 2017. Due to complications from his heroin addiction, he contracted a rare, progressive brain disease that kills anyone who gets it within six months. He deteriorated to the point where doctors thought he was brain-dead but, in fact, he was trapped in his body, fully conscious, despite the inability to speak, eat or move a muscle. He was in hell. And he became aware that his wife, who outwardly played the fiercely protective caregiver, was separating him from his family, planning to divorce him; she even announced his death on social media. Spoiler alert: he miraculously survives. In the podcast Blink, host Corinne Vien helps Haendel tell the remarkable tale of someone who lost his life and then clawed his way back. Barry Divola
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Mastermind' Review: Josh O'Connor Lands on Kelly Reichardt's Precise Wavelength in an Understated, Funny-Sad Heist Movie Like No Other
Leave it to Kelly Reichardt to make a '70s movie that looks and feels like a lost '70s movie, from its scruffy visual aesthetic to its muted colors, its patient character observation and unhurried pacing to its unstinting investment in an underdog protagonist whose careful planning results in a coup that soon goes south. Josh O'Connor's rumpled appeal makes him an ideal fit for the title role in The Mastermind, a minor-key heist caper that spends as much or more time on the aftermath of the crime, when it morphs gracefully into another of the director's singular character studies of struggling Americans. The film is set in Massachusetts circa 1970, two decades before the infamous art theft at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose walls still conserve the empty spaces where stolen paintings by artists including Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet and Degas once hung. It seems like quintessential Reichardt that James Blaine Mooney (O'Connor) is not going after the Old Masters or anything even close in value. Instead, he targets four paintings by American modernist Arthur Dove, one of the country's pioneering abstract painters — influential but back then not in high demand. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Amrum' Review: Diane Kruger in Fatih Akin's Sentimental Drama Set During the Last Days of Nazi Germany Cannes Gives Warm Welcome to Dardennes and 'Young Mother's Home' 'Resurrection' Review: Director Bi Gan's Beguiling, Beautifully Realized Journey Through the Life, Death and Possible Rebirth of Cinema Reichardt takes her first solo writing credit on this feature, which nonetheless has echoes of two films penned with frequent screenwriting collaborator Jonathan Raymond. It has shades of the meticulous planning of the eco-activists who blow up a hydroelectric dam in Night Moves and continues the vein of subtle humor that made the microcosmic art world view in Showing Up so captivating. The opening sequence follows J.B. as he walks from room to room, studying both the art and the snoozing guard in a fictional museum in Framingham. (Stand-in for the exteriors is the I.M. Pei-designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library with its massive Henry Moore bronze out front, memorably showcased in the beautiful Kogonada film, Columbus.) One half of a pair of young twins prattles on incessantly about some sci-fi arcana while the boy's bored-looking mother and his quieter brother tune him out. Only once J.B. has opened a display cabinet to pilfer a small artifact and they head for the exit does it become clear that the woman is his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and the kids are his sons, Carl and Tommy (Sterling and Jasper Thompson). Terri appears to be an accomplice while the boys serve as decoys, which initially calls to mind stories of families in petty crime cahoots like Hirokazu Kore-eda's masterpiece, Shoplifters. But that proves to be a bit of crafty misdirection. When James moves beyond small trial runs and prepares to lift the Dove paintings, Terri seems to want to know as little as possible. James puts together a team of three, Guy (Eli Gelb, one of the discoveries of Broadway hit Stereophonics), Larry (Cole Doman) and Ronnie Gibson (Javion Allen), assuring them they will be in and out in eight minutes. James explains that he can't be there while the heist is going down because his face is now too well known to museum staff. But when Larry bails as driver, J.B. has to fill that role, and although they do get the paintings out, things don't entirely go according to plan thanks to Ronnie, who pulls a gun on an art student and gets into a scuffle with a security guard at the exit. Several scenes later, after Ronnie has caused further trouble, J.B. gets a too-late lesson in the mocking words of a savvier thief (Matthew Maher): 'Never work with drug addicts, dealers or wild cards.' Once news of the daring daylight art heist breaks, J.B.'s father, Bill (Bill Camp), a local judge, also has thoughts that might have been more useful before the event: 'It seems inconceivable that these abstract paintings would be worth the trouble.' One of the great contemporary character actors, Camp dials up the pomposity as Judge Mooney muses about the dark market before conceding, 'These things are outside my realm of experience.' Bill's criticism of unemployed James for not making something of his carpentry skills like a small business owner with whom he was at school seem a significant factor in J.B's decision to try making money the easy way. Dishonestly. His mother, Sarah (Hope Davis, sublime), is more indulgent with him, though when he hits her up for a sizeable loan on top of money he already owes her, she insists on a scheduled repayment plan. While Reichardt never pushes for comedy, these fusty parental exchanges are often very funny, as are J.B.'s bad-parenting episodes with the boys. Period production and costume design (by Anthony Gasparro and Amy Roth, respectively) are instantly evocative of the era, while being careful never to distract with conspicuous kitsch. But some relics of the '70s inevitably get laughs — the crank-handle rear window that gives Guy trouble while he's rushing to load the paintings into the back of a stolen station wagon; the forgotten marketing gimmick of L'eggs Pantyhose, sold in plastic egg-shaped packaging, which J.B. provides to his crew to wear as masks. Reichardt finds infectious fascination in some of the more mundane elements of the crime, such as James applying his carpentry know-how to build a tailor-made storage crate for the paintings. That crate then yields physical comedy when he crawls up a ladder to hide it in a hayloft while a pig snorts away in the background, snarfling for food and paying J.B. no attention. Playing a character who might easily be an American cousin to his sad-sack grave robber in La Chimera, O'Connor deftly balances those comic moments with a slow build of melancholy and regret — 'I didn't really think it through,' he says morosely — as J.B.'s get-rich-quick scheme slips out of his reach. Haim, the singer who became a breakout screen star in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, has less to work with as Terri. But she says a lot with her eyes about the character's internal battle between forbearance and walking away to protect herself and the boys from James' wreckage. There seems genuine regret on both sides when James loses Terri as an ally. The economy of Haim's performance is very much in keeping with Reichardt's less-is-more policy with her actors, which applies to the incisive casting even of the smallest roles, with faces that look right at home in the era. There's an interlude both lovely and sad in which James is still at large despite his face being splashed across newspapers. O'Connor strikes poignant notes when J.B. fools himself into thinking he's safe while laying low at the farm of his old friend Fred (indispensable Reichardt regular John Magaro) and his wife Maude (Gaby Hoffmann), who is convinced James is using their old college art professor as his fence. Fred appears quite excited to have a wanted felon in their midst, Maude considerably less so, which hastens J.B.'s departure. Throughout the film, newspaper headlines and snippets of TV contextualize the story against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, colleges retaliating to student campus protests and aggressive policing, along with glimpses of Richard Nixon's crooked grin. While Reichardt is careful not to hammer this element too loudly, it's impossible to miss the parallels with today's political landscape. James' attempted flight to Canada hits a snag during one of those street protests, and the final shot of him, boxed into a small part of the frame, is crushing. Longtime DP collaborator Christopher Blauvelt, who also shot Meek's Cutoff, Night Moves, Certain Women, First Cow and Showing Up for Reichardt, remains a matchless fit for the director's naturalistic minimalism, ensuring that even rows of trees in blazing fall colors are never overly pretty. As she did with Night Moves, Reichardt has made a genre picture that peels away all the usual tropes to focus on character, on human failings and on the reality that even someone from a comfortable middle-class background can be worn down by struggle and reach for unwise solutions. The only major departure for Reichardt is the highly effective use of a score by jazz musician Rob Mazurek. The cool, but also nervy riffs of percussion, bass, brass and drums sound like the work of a beatnik dive bar ensemble winding down at the end of a long set, providing the perfect complement to a decelerated movie that runs on understatement. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Josh O'Connor Is a Sullen '70s Art Thief in Kelly Reichardt's ‘The Mastermind' First Look
It will be a challenge to find a 2025 film that Josh O'Connor is not in. The 'Challengers' breakout star is leading the third 'Knives Out' feature (all we know is that he's playing a priest), plus is starring alongside Paul Mescal in 'The History Of Sound' and will be in Steven Spielberg's next project about UFOs. First, though, O'Connor is starring in Kelly Reichardt's latest, 'The Mastermind.' The film will debut in competition at Cannes. Oliver Hermanus' 'The History Of Sound' will also be in the main competition so O'Connor has two shots at being in a Palme d'Or winner this year. More from IndieWire 'Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted' Review: A Free-Spirited Music Doc as Delightfully Weird as Its Subject Got a Project? Submit to These Summer 2025 Grants, Fellowships, Labs, and Funding Opportunities For 'The Mastermind,' O'Connor plays JB Mooney, an unemployed carpenter who becomes an aspiring amateur art thief. The only issue is that JB's first big heist goes haywire, leading him to confront his life choices. The film is set in rural Massachusetts in the 1970s. Alana Haim, John Magaro, Hope Davis, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffmann, Amanda Plummer, Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, Javion Allen, Matthew Maher and Rhenzy Feliz co-star. Reichardt most recently directed 2022 film 'Showing Up' which starred her frequent collaborator Michelle Williams. She has also helmed 'First Cow,' 'Meek's Cutoff,' and 'Wendy and Lucy,' all of which were co-written by Jon Raymond. 'The Mastermind' is also Reichardt's third film with actor Magaro. Neil Kopp, Anish Savjani, and Vincent Savino of filmscience produce the feature, reuniting with Reichardt. The company has financed all of Reichardt's films since 'Old Joy.' 'The Mastermind' will be distributed by MUBI in North America, U.K., Ireland, LATAM, Germany, Austria, Benelux, Turkey, and India, with The Match Factory handling international sales. This is the second time MUBI has worked with Reichardt, the first being for 'First Cow' in 2021. 'The Mastermind' is one of six female-directed features debuting in competition at Cannes. The others include Julia Ducournau ('Alpha'), Mascha Schilinski (the buzzy 'Sound of Falling,' previously titled 'The Doctor Says I'll Be Alright, But I'm Feelin' Blue'), Hafsia Herzi ('La Petite Dernière'), Chie Hayakawa ('Renoir'), and Carla Simón ('Romeria'), among the main competition at the Croisette. Check out the first look images for 'The Mastermind' below. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Mastermind' Review: Josh O'Connor Is an Art Thief Hijacked by His Own Heist in Kelly Reichardt's Jazzy 1970s Throwback
When the jazzy, jittery opening of Kelly Reichardt's 'The Mastermind' begins with slow, vertically crawling title cards in Bauhaus-like font, you know you're about to be thrown back in cinematic time. Shot on film with the grainy warmth that evokes a sleepy 1970 New England municipality as much as it does actual movies from the '70s, 'The Mastermind' is Reichardt's version of a heist movie — meaning that the filmmaker hijacks conventions laid by filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville and Sidney Lumet for a spin that still retains her patient bent for long, luxuriating takes. Here, Josh O'Connor plays J.B. Mooney (what a name!), an art thief who falls down a hole of his own digging, as a poorly hatched job to rip off a series of Arthur Dove abstract paintings from a fictional Massachusetts museum sends his private and family lives careening out of his grasp. More from IndieWire These Cannes 2025 Prize Winners Will Inspire Oscar Campaigns Cowboys vs. Accountants: The Real World of International Production Financing | Future of Filmmaking Summit at Cannes 'The Mastermind' is more an aftermath-of-a-heist movie than one about the job's high-stakes particulars, though Reichardt captures them with breath-bating suspense in the film's first act. Reichardt, writing her own script, is more invested in the what-happens-after, the slow-drip comedown of J.B.'s catastrophic hubris in thinking he could carry out a grab-and-run robbery in such a small town. Especially when his father (Bill Camp, hilariously curmudgeonly as an old-guard type who sticks his nose up at modern art) is its local judge. The absorbing setup makes for Reichardt's purest genre exercise since her eco-terrorist caper 'Night Moves' (2013) or her slow-cinema anti-Western 'Meek's Cutoff' (2011) before that. Her observational approach doesn't always retrofit seamlessly to the genre scaffolding that surrounds it — a structure she will slowly work to topple and destroy as 'The Mastermind' grows more languorous — but the period-rich atmosphere she conjures with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt and costumer Amy Roth makes for an intoxicating, transportive experience. And her composition and framing, and eye for 1970 in all its mustardy polyester and corduroy-browns and retro fuzziness, suggest the influence of her dear friend Todd Haynes more than ever, this time around. (Stalwart Reichardt DP Blauvelt also shot Haynes' 'May December.') Disheveled and charmingly louche in that unkempt early-'70s way, J.B. is an unemployed carpenter who lives in a sedate Massachusetts suburb with his working wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two boys (Sterling and Jasper Thompson, real-life fraternal twins). He's in perpetual debt to his moneyed parents (Hope Davis and Camp), and judging by their weekly ritual of a meat-and-mashed-potatoes dinner at mom and dad's house, he hasn't strayed far from the nest financially, geographically, or emotionally. It's 1970, and radio dispatches and television news relay fragmented context about the ongoing Vietnam War, placing an almost apocalyptic backdrop behind the film's core domestic narrative as violence seeps from afar into the everyday. A former art history student, J.B. lives a double life as a petty art thief, subtly purloining a small wooden artifact from the glass case of a Framingham Museum of Art gallery in the film's first scene, almost as a lark, a self-started dare to see if he can do it. That double life extends to covert basement huddles he hosts with his ragtag group of accomplices beneath the first floor of J.B. and Terri's single-story house (this includes actors Eli Gelb, Cole Doman, and Javion Allen), as he prepares for the next, bigger job. Reichardt doesn't at all explore the inner life of Terri, though Alana Haim (an established breakout actor after Paul Thomas Anderson plucked her from the music scene for his 'Licorice Pizza') cuts an alluring silhouette in rare moments onscreen — like a shot of her done up in hair curlers heading out to her car, or heard offscreen over a slyly sad, hushed phone call later in the film. What J.B. has planned next feels doomed from the start, and 'The Mastermind' is a study in doom from the start. He and his associates — who all get their own individual quirks and styling, courtesy of Roth and hair stylist Anna Maria Reyer — plan to steal a suite of paintings by Upstate New York artist Arthur Dove (whose abstract pastels were recreated for the film) from the Framingham in broad daylight. Reichardt stages the heist as a nail-biting montage, cutting from inside the museum where J.B.'s men set upon their robbery to within the gold '64 Chevy Nova J.B. waits in out front (Reichardt, as with her last seven films, does editing duties, too). Much of 'The Mastermind' is spent in cars, either stationary or on the move and the run, Blauvelt's camera placing us in the backseat or hoodside of the boxy vehicles that are scene stealers of their own. It all goes to shit, of course, especially once J.B.'s Black cohort Ronnie Gibson (Allen), nylon stocking now unsheathed from his face, pulls a gun on a potential witness out front of the museum. His fate as the scheme unravels and unwinds gets a mostly surface-level racial politics inquiry from Reichardt, and it's unsurprising when he's the first one to land in jail. Generally speaking, Reichardt's social commentary is only surface-scratching, the fractious Civil Rights dynamics and wartime unrest relegated to those TV news briefs, the protest posters papered on walls throughout town. That's perhaps to demonstrate how unaffected and unscathed that J.B., a comfortably middle-class white guy who comes from a comfortably middle-class family, is from all that noise of draft dodgers, dope fiends, and radical feminists banging on the door. Until he, of course, eventually isn't. The fallout of J.B.'s messy hijack is less airtight than its setup, with the cops on the horn and Terri catching scent of what's going on. 'The Mastermind' becomes a lonely existential man-on-the-run movie as J.B. sloppily covers his tracks and tries to disappear; a long take, though, of J.B. attempting to stow the paintings in a barn, dragging himself back home at dawn covered in pig slop, is among the most thrilling of Reichardt's career. She's flexing into genre mode while also pulling from her signature paintbox of taciturn character observation, as slow a burn as near-silent moments out of 'First Cow' or even 'Old Joy.' (Reichardt, too, brings her 'First Cow' actor John Magaro into the mix, in a role that feels more like a cameo than anything else.) There's also Rob Mazurek's Bill Evans-inspired jazz score to sink us even deeper into a movie that's all about capturing a mood, a vibe. Reichardt credits records from Sun Ra and John Coltrane as influences behind the trumpet-and-percussion thrum of the music, though the riffs of Miles Davis' ennui-and-smoke-drenched 'Elevator to the Gallows' score also come to mind, putting 'The Mastermind' more in conversation with midcentury art films than the American heist movies whose form Reichardt flouts. Which means that 'The Mastermind,' even with an effectively understated performance from in-demand actor O'Connor as a man trying to outwit his own unraveling, could be a tough sell for audiences outside of the core Reichardt cult. The film spins its wheels toward the end, even while landing on a hilariously macabre final image that feels ripped out of the most nihilistic of French arthouse classics. 'Everything I've done is for you and the kids,' J.B. tells Terri over the phone at one point, before pausing to add, 'And me.' 'The Mastermind' is a study in one man's selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick. In that sense, Reichardt has something in common with her antihero: She's challenged herself to execute a well-trodden shape and style of genre storytelling on her own terms, though she succeeds more than we know from frame one J.B. ever could. 'The Mastermind' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release it in theaters later this year. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
