Josh O'Connor, a gentleman thief in a wool sweater

The crime genre (or its apathetic reinterpretation) is nothing new to Kelly Reichardt, one of the most important American filmmakers of the last three decades. Since her debut, River of grass, even the masterful First cow, passing through Night movesThe crime – blowing up a dam or stealing milk from someone else's cow – appears as the only possible act of dissent for the outsiders unavoidable themes that abound in his films. Shot on celluloid by his regular collaborator, Christopher Blauvelt, The mastermind From the opening credits, we are transported to the turbulent United States of the early seventies, newly awakened from the utopian dream of the sixties. In a small town, JB Mooney (an excellent Josh O'Connor who changes the wrinkled white dress of The Chimera (wearing worn-out wool sweaters), a failed art student, family man, and unemployed carpenter, organizes what he imagines as the perfect heist: the theft of artwork from a local museum.

Reichardt, who is also the editor, films the criminal act with a combination of languor, pragmatic austerity, and physical comedy, and soon reveals that what truly interests her is not the crime itself but its consequences. Thus, the film becomes, in its second half, the story of Stations of the Cross The protagonist's personal ordeal is an existential and physical struggle akin to the radicalism and formal rigor of Bresson's cinema (hiding stolen works of art had never required so much effort or occupied so much screen time as in the barn scene). But JB's journey is not a path to redemption, but rather a flight to nowhere, initiated by a futile gesture and driven by a somnolent, solipsistic masculinity, so self-absorbed that it is incapable of seeing the world around it. A personal and generational failure that speaks as much to Nixon's America as to the present day, and which is definitively revealed in the dazzling final plan.