the best heist movie of recent times

Stealing can be an art, if you do it like the butronero of Notes from a heist movie (2018), by Elías León Siminiania spectacle, like the blows of the Ocean’s Eleven (2001) by Soderberghor a nonsense, as in the case of the protagonist of The Mastermindof Kelly Reichardtwhich has very little criminal genius. After passing through Cannes and Seminci, The Mastermind arrives in movie theaters a few weeks after the big Louvre jewelry robbery with a radial and sliding ladder. Nor is James B. Mooney’s technique very sophisticated (Josh O’Connor), the taciturn type who in The Mastermind decides to take some paintings by the American abstract artist Arthur Dove with which he intends to compensate for a life of apathy and bad decisions.

Massachusetts, 1970s. James is a carpenter with little trade and less profit, married to Terri (Alana Haim) and father of two sons, Carl and Tommy (Sterling y Jasper Thompson), one of them – since they are twins – is a word-making machine. James’s parents, wealthy and profitable people – the father is a judge, to make matters worse – urge him to put order and direction in his life; He is asking them for money for his umpteenth entrepreneurial adventure. A company that pretends to steal a handful of works of art openly from the fictitious Framingham Art Museum. Reichardt was loosely inspired by a robbery that occurred in 1972 at the Worcester Art Museum, where a Picasso, a Rembrandt and two Gauguin paintings were taken.

Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker who He is particularly interested in the processes: yes in Night Moves (2013) we learned how some environmental terrorists made homemade bombs and in First Cow (2019) Reichardt used the recipe for making a cake to explain the birth of capitalism, in The Mastermind We witness the meticulous planning of an art theft in every detail. Reichardt meticulously portrays all the preparation of the coup and takes his time so that we see how James, who is not the sharpest pencil in the case, intends to bypass the security of the building and take the works.

The experimental jazz soundtrack by Rob Mazurek gives the film a silky, carefree pace as we watch James make unorthodox decisions on his path to glory. Nor does his son’s verbiage, the excessive interest of some schoolgirls in Dove’s works, a slight traffic jam around the museum or the police patrolling at the most inopportune moment help much. He sophisticated comedy tone of The Mastermind could remind us of the previous Woody Allen, with a protagonist as magnetic as it is pathetic trying to carry out, if not an impossible, then an improbable.

But it is in the second half of The Mastermind when the movie takes an unexpected turn and leaves souring in the psychological portrait of an increasingly miserable and narcissistic James, who will try to get his way regardless of who he takes out. The Mastermind -an ironic title that makes fun of the character’s inability- shows a man who overestimates his abilities and who seeks to escape his chain of bad life decisions. As the end approaches, we meet a man who He pushes himself towards flight.

As he has done on previous occasions with the western, Reichardt subverts the codes of heist cinema betting on a slower and more contemplative pace and a deep portrait of the thief. The Mastermind has something melancholic with its ocher and autumnal colors, with its velvety texture as if from an ancient memory, and as the footage progresses it’s getting darker at the same time as the story itself.

Shot digitally with an Alexa 35 – a 4K Super 35 camera – the film is a great pictorial beautylike from paintings by Edward Hopper. The portrait of the United States, with the protests over the Vietnam War in the background, contrasts with the amoral, apolitical and unmotivated character that O’Connor represents, the individual doomed to seclusion and isolation. Such a self-absorbed individual can only end up alone, Reichardt seems to warn us, in a film cool which, however, in its second half loses some steam but gains depth.

Stealing can be an art, if you do it like the butronero of Notes from a heist movie (2018), by Elías León Siminiania spectacle, like the blows of the Ocean’s Eleven (2001) by Soderberghor a nonsense, as in the case of the protagonist of The Mastermindof Kelly Reichardtwhich has very little criminal genius. After passing through Cannes and Seminci, The Mastermind arrives in movie theaters a few weeks after the big Louvre jewelry robbery with a radial and sliding ladder. Nor is James B. Mooney’s technique very sophisticated (Josh O’Connor), the taciturn type who in The Mastermind decides to take some paintings by the American abstract artist Arthur Dove with which he intends to compensate for a life of apathy and bad decisions.