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‘The Mastermind’ Review: Kelly Reichardt Steals the Spirit of the ’70s With a Gorgeously Rumpled Arthouse Art-Heist
Josh O'Connor plays a family man whose under-planned theft from a local art museum goes amusingly awry in Kelly Reichardt's inspired "The Mastermind"
Unbeknownst to Terri, and indeed to everyone except composer Mazurek who by now has added some vibraphone and a little jazz trumpet to up the intrigue factor, JB is actually casing the joint, not that a small-town art museum in the early 70s has much in the way of theft deterrent beyond a reliably dozing guard and a slow-to-react doorman. All the while, edging the frames of master DP Christopher Blauvelt’s warmly lived-in, autumnal images, there are anti-war protests and counterculture references and Walter Cronkite on TV talking about the Vietnam War’s recent spread into Cambodia. At first this background noise seems to be so much period color, like the superb production design by Anthony Gasparro, which so authentically evokes an era when pantyhose came packaged in little plastic eggs, when the back windows of station wagons could be laboriously rolled down by hand, and when the most straightforward way to note down someone’s address was to rip the relevant page out of a public telephone book.
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