Cannes 2025: In "The Mastermind," Kelly Reichardt revisits the heist film, without noise or sirens

OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION

It's a bit easy to say that The Mastermind is not the masterpiece of Kelly Reichardt, a figure of American independent cinema, who has dazzled us in the past by revisiting the western in The Last Track (2010) and First Cow (2019), or by showing the other side of the artist's life in Showing Up , in competition at Cannes in 2022. But it is the immediate effect that this last feature film in the competition gave us, unveiled on Friday May 23, on the eve of the Palme d'Or award ceremony, by Juliette Binoche , president of the jury for this ^78th Cannes edition.

Kelly Reichardt, born in 1964, deconstructs the heist film genre here, imagining a 1970 painting theft – as the car's sticker proves – in a fictional museum in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, a state that the director, originally from Florida, is filming for the first time.

The mastermind of the heist, unemployed carpenter JB Mooney (Josh O'Connor), is not a crazy Al Pacino type, sowing terror in the middle of a bank in Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975). A former art student, JB is a penniless, moony family man, and perhaps that's why Kelly Reichardt gave him the surname Mooney, a contraction of moon and money .

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