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The Mastermind (2025)

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It seems like I’ve seen almost no marketing for The Mastermind, which is odd considering that I remember seeing the trailer for its director’s previous film, First Cow, approximately a thousand times (likely because it was released during the height of MoviePass). This does seem to be a personal experience, however, as every person to whom I mention Kelly Reichardt’s name has no idea what I’m talking about, even when I quote Toby Jones’s wistful “I taste London in this cake” line from the First Cow trailer (which, as stated before, I saw too many times to count). The little advertising that I have seen for The Mastermind led me to believe that this film would be a little more active than Reichardt’s other films have a reputation for being. When he wrote about Certain Women, Brandon noted that Reichardt’s films have “the impact of an encroaching tide, not a crashing tidal wave,” and that’s a succinct description of the way that her films creep up on you while she allows the camera to run long on every single action, which one wouldn’t think would pair well with a heist film. So, of course, that’s not exactly what this is. 

James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is a feckless man, an art student who dropped out of school to become a carpenter, as much as one can “become a carpenter” if he’s chronically unemployed and relying on his wife (Alana Haim) as the sole breadwinner, with the occasional cash injection from his mother. J.B.’s father William (Bill Camp) is a judge of a certain stature who can’t fathom why J.B. has failed to become the success that his brother, who owns his own business, has. J.B.’s protestations that pushing around paperwork is a “stupid way to spend [one’s] time” fall as hollowly on his father’s ears as they do on ours. After he successfully manages to steal a small figurine from a display case at the Framingham Museum of Art, he hatches a plan to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the same location. The heist itself goes off relatively easily despite some setbacks, but one of the men he hired reveals details about the theft when he’s apprehended while robbing a bank, and J.B. goes on the run, although that terminology is somewhat meaningless when we’re talking about a film with a pace like this. 

The Mastermind becomes a series of vignettes as J.B. interacts with interested parties, law enforcement, and old friends who have a variety of reactions to him showing up at their doorstep. Of particular note are the performances from Sterling and Jasper Thompson, who play the Mooney boys Carl and Tommy, respectively; they feel like the more down-to-earth versions of Ben Stiller’s Minis-Me in The Royal Tenenbaums, and both boys are pretty reliable sources of humor. From the film’s opening, Tommy plays an unknowing part in his father’s museum theft practice run, as his seemingly endless recitation of a stock logic puzzle, complete with starting and stopping as he corrects himself or forgets where he was going, and one can’t help but laugh. Tommy also ends up being in the car with his father when one of the thieves, Guy Hickey (Eli Gelb), lures him to meet with a few jovial gangsters, one of whom even gives J.B. some decent advice about how to be a better criminal in the future. Of course, J.B. doesn’t really accept any advice from anyone, or he wouldn’t have ended up in this situation. 

I’m curious to see how other people will react to the titular mastermind as a character as this film sees a wider release (if it does). It’s fascinating to watch Josh O’Connor play a role that’s so quietly despicable, and the fact that it’s him in the part makes you feel some measure of sympathy for J.B., despite him being objectively awful. He lies to his mother to get seed money to hire his heist associates under the guise of needing it to rent a space and tools for a carpentry project that will get him back into a good financial situation; he steals for no other reason than that he’s the worst kind of lazy person — one who will waste ten times the amount of energy needed to do something on avoiding doing that thing instead; and the last thing he does before the credits roll is rob an old lady (Amanda Plummer!) to get bus fare to continue his rambles. All around him are the signs of the anti-war protests of 1970, with every television set that appears in the film existing solely to provide more news about campus rebels and retaliatory police action. God-fearing American Patriots™ like his father (who criticizes the art thieves in front of J.B. for their having stolen modern art rather than something that he considers to be of value) surround J.B., and each time they appear they jab their fingers in the direction of  hippies and jeer, calling them cowardly and lazy for their pacifism, while the most cowardly, lazy degenerate one could imagine sits in their midst, the son of a judge, invisible. 

Haim isn’t given much to do in this one other than to quietly express disappointment at her husband from a distance; she’s a pair of feet on the stairs down to the basement where the heist is being planned, or she’s a blurred figure in the distance of the frame, arms folded. That’s somewhat to be expected, as the film is really O’Connor’s vehicle, but there are other characters who are quite a lot of fun. There’s a small group of teenage girls who hang in and around the museum, and two of them are held at gunpoint and give delightful interviews on TV later, and Gelb is very funny as the eternal failure Hickey. There’s a great sequence once J.B. is on the road where he ends up at the home of his now-married college friends Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffman) in which Fred is kind, friendly, and happy to see his friend, while Maude—who it’s implied may have had a thing with J.B. in the past—sees straight through all of the charm and “Aw, shucks” that O’Connor is bringing to the table. She’s the highlight of the film; I’ve never seen such great passive aggressive hospitality in the form of understatedly hostile egg frying, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

The Mastermind is kind of like Inside Llewyn Davis if it had a jazz soundtrack instead of being a folk musical. It’s also a bit of a look into what Tom Ripley would be like if he was all ideas and no follow-through; he even does a little bit of passport fakery, although we never get to see if he would have made it past border patrol. It’s not a tidal wave (if that’s what you’re looking for, what you seek is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You). It’s barely a current, but if you’re in the mood for something that’s decompressed, there are worse choices to be made.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Prophecy (1995)

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I remember seeing previews for the Sci-Fi Channel premiere of Gregory Widen’s directorial debut The Prophecy (which, as of this writing, is his only feature director credit, although he did an episode of Tales from the Crypt) in the late 90s. It scared me a little, and I also remember being a little freaked out by the VHS cover, with Christopher Walken looming over figures in the desert, yellow eyes shining. He’s great in this, and when the movie works, it’s usually because of the inhumanity of his Archangel Gabriel, a kind of body language and erratic emphasis that’s one of the actor’s many specialties. Widen also wrote the film, having previously garnered some success for penning 1986’s Highlander as well as 1991’s firefighter action thriller Backdraft. As a horror fantasy, The Prophecy obviously borrows more from the former than the latter, once again featuring battles between immortal beings, ancient texts, and the grappling between Good and Evil. 

The film opens with narration from Simon (Eric Stoltz), an angel, as he recounts the events of the First War in Heaven, the story that we all know about a third of the angels being struck down from heaven because Lucifer rebelled in an attempt to become a god himself. What we don’t know is that there was a Second War, one that’s been in a stalemate since the first one, between those angels loyal to the Almighty and those led by Gabriel (Walken, as noted), who are throwing a cosmic temper tantrum over God’s preference for humans, as demonstrated by the latter’s possession of souls. In fact, because of this cold war, no soul has ever reached heaven in the history of mankind. As Gabriel later reveals, humans are much more skilled than angels in the areas of “war and treachery of the spirit,” and thus he and his lackeys are seeking out a deeply evil soul of a recently deceased war criminal, as his talent for warmaking could tip the scales in the balance of the rebels. Caught up in all of this is Thomas Dagget, a detective who, years earlier, saw a vision of angels at war during his final confirmation for the priesthood, causing him to abandon the faith. He’s called in when the body of one of Gabriel’s lieutenants, slain in an altercation with Simon, is found and autopsied, with strange results. For instance, when humans grow, their bones have natural striations that can be used to determine the age of a body, but this man’s bones have no such markings, as if they were created spontaneously in their current form; he also has the blood chemistry of an aborted fetus. 

Simon and Thomas meet briefly before the angel takes off to Arizona to dig up the grave of the recently deceased Colonel Hawthorne, from whose corpse he inhales the man’s dark soul. Knowing that Gabriel is hot on his trail, Simon sticks the soul inside of a young girl named Mary (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder) at the local reservation school, shortly before Gabriel arrives and kills him. Mary’s teacher Katherine (Virginia Madsen) starts to notice a change in the girl’s disposition as well as her declining health. Meanwhile, Gabriel searches for the soul hiding spot with the help of two undead lackeys: Jeffrey (Adam Goldberg), whose life was suspended by Gabriel in the moment of his suicide, and later Rachael (Amanda Plummer), who is caught in the moment of her death by cancer. The film makes its most interesting turn with the appearance of Lucifer (Viggo Mortenson), who doesn’t care all that much for the people caught in the middle but knows that a victory on Gabriel’s part will turn Heaven into Hell which, as he says, “is one hell too many.” 

This movie is messy. Widen has a strong eye for composition and the film has a style that’s unique, and he manages to craft some truly horrifying images, most notably quick flashes of the grisly results of the heavenly war with angels impaled on spears and rotting through Thomas’s visions (think the very brief splices of the terrors that had to be cut from Event Horizon to secure its R rating). There are also some fun things that he does with the mythology that, since he was basically crafting his own Bible fanfic and could make up the rules as he went along, can likely be accredited to him all the way. In particular, I love the way that every angel that we meet has a habit of “perching” on things — road barriers, fence posts, the backs of chairs. It’s like an unconscious habit for them to sit on their feet with their legs folded beneath them like birds, and it’s a clever bit of storytelling through body language. I also really liked the angel autopsy, as each of the things that’s revealed about the corpse is something that makes sense as a scientific oddity that would befuddle a coroner in the way that it’s similar to but not exactly like a human body. 

For the most part, the toying with of fantasy elements works. Lucifer’s reluctant (and ultimately self-interested) investment in preventing the villainous Gabriel from getting his way is good stuff. Although the inclusion of Jeffrey and Rachael is a bit superfluous (Jeffrey mostly serves the in-universe function of driving Gabriel around and handling all the human stuff and the narrative purpose of receiving exposition, and Rachael just replaces for the last fifteen minutes after Jeffrey when he dies), the whole slowly dying puppets angle is interesting. The conflict between Gabriel and the loyal heavenly guard is also clear. What doesn’t work is where it gets bogged down in all of Hawthorne’s soul stuff. We spend too much of the film with Thomas investigating who Hawthorne was (a Korean War general, war criminal, and apparent cannibal) just to establish that he has a truly awful talent for suffering and war, and it really doesn’t make a lot of sense that Simon would stick this McGuffin into a little girl other than because the narrative says he has to. It’s lucky that Lucifer turns up at the end to claim the soul once it’s exorcised from Mary via a Native American ritual (no tribe is ever named, nor is the ritual given a title either; it’s just the typical nineties “Magical Native American” trope), because otherwise I’m not really sure what his endgame was. It’s all a bit convoluted, to the film’s detriment. Its other problem is that, well, it’s just not very good. No one is giving a bad performance, there are some decently unique visual choices and interesting tableaux, but this is a 90s destined-for-VHS-cult-status movie that will forever be playing third banana to Candyman (which also featured Madsen) and The Crow, the sleepover flick for you and your goth best friend when those two (or The Craft, which released the following year) were already rented out on a Friday night. It’s available for streaming right now on Tubi … but only in Spanish. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Freejack (1992)

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Hoo boy is this one a lot of fun, and it’s free, Jack! (Sorry.) Crackerjack racecar star Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is looking forward to marrying sweetheart Julie Redlund (Rene Russo) once he gets all of his ducks in a row. Unfortunately, this crisp November 1991 day is the day that he crashes his racer in a deadly fireball, leaving behind a heartbroken Julie. Meanwhile, in the distant future of 2009, Vacendak (Mick Jagger) and his crew of “bonejackers” cruise through a hellish dystopia in order to line up their machinery with Furlong’s past accident and teleport (or “freejack”) him into the future. See, scientists have figured out how to transfer consciousness from one body to another, gifting immortality to (the wealthiest 1% of) humankind; however, since everyone in 2009 has lived with such intense and prolonged pollution and suffering, the rich don’t want their bodies. Instead, people like Vacendak are bounty hunters for people who can be plucked out of the stream of time like a fish without causing any time-snarling shenanigans — that is, moments before their death and only if they wouldn’t leave identifiable remains anyway. When the bonejacker caravan is knocked out of commission, Furlong escapes. 

After making his way home and finding that Julie no longer lives there, Furlong stumbles into a church, where an atypical nun (Amanda Plummer) fills in the background of the new world order. She explains the concept of freejacking, the immortality machine, and why it looks so much like Class of 1999 outside. She is unable to find Julie online but is able to connect Furlong with his old manager Brad (David Johansen of New York Dolls), who promises to get him in contact with Julie. Elsewhere, Julie has done rather well for herself, rising to an executive position at a major corporation headed by Ian McCandless (Anthony Hopkins), where she works alongside the CEO’s right-hand man Michelette (Jonathan Banks). She, along with the other elites, lives in one of a series of skyscrapers in a gated part of the city, far from the hoarse cries of any yearning masses longing to be free. Furlong must convince her that he is who he says he is—not some guy who freejacked her lost love—and avoid capture by Vacendak, Michelette, or any other interested party for 36 hours, at which point the mind of the mysterious rich person who wants to take over his body will be too degraded to be redownloaded. 

This is exactly the kind of movie that the camp stamp was made for. Normally, a low-brow, high-concept movie like this requires the invention of some kind of fantastical breakthrough or discovery, but this film requires two miraculous feats of science (mind transference and time trafficking), which should push the envelope to the point of being too unbelievable. And, yeah, it is, but once you see the series of casual leather outfits that Jagger gets to parade around in, the minitanks that the bonejackers drive (one of them is indigo with pink detailing and the name Sheila emblazoned in neon green script), the hideously eighties stone offices, and what the creators believed passenger cars would look like in 2009, then it’s impossible not to just give in and have a good time. In a way, Freejack presages companion Rip-Van-Winkle-but-as-a-nineties-action-flick film Demolition Man, but while that film is, in many ways, a conservative’s worst nightmare about a future ruled by political correctness, Freejack is movie that recognizes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that corporate interests and wealth hoarders’ desperation to prolong their lives are the things that will/do dominate the 21st century. Both films, however, spend a lot of time exploring the fish-out-of-temporal-water nature of the protagonist after just a couple of decades while also demonstrating technological and social leaps that are completely impossible during such a short time frame. And, because Furlong is a racer, Freejack is also chock full of chase scenes and races against time, which create the illusion of plot progression even when it spins its wheels from time to time. 

If anything, this is the result of being overstuffed. Production problems on the film were rife (YouTube channel GoodBadFlicks released a pretty extensive overview a few months ago), and although it doesn’t seem to have had much of a cultural impact, it’s strange that this one hasn’t had its day in the limelight as a wrongly maligned, misunderstood classic. This was released just at the start of Estevez’s star renaissance, as The Mighty Ducks released later that year, and came right on the heels of Hopkins’s career-defining role in Silence of the Lambs. A lot of major performers meet at this crossroads, but it’s been all but forgotten in the wake of their other successes, but in spite of all of the studio interference, I think that there’s actually a pretty great nineties action flick here. This would be the decade that, in the wake of the eighties sci-fi action hat trick of Terminator, Predator, and Aliens, speculative fiction would become a dominating factor in action film before reaching its apotheosis in 1999 with The Matrix; Freejack, with its “spiritual switchboard” technology and the hijacking of people’s bodies, is a part of that cyberpunk evolution. It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts; there’s a sequence near the end where Furlong confronts the person responsible for his freejacking in a spherical room that projects a series of holograms that represent the mind of the stored villain. Images fade in and out, and although I think it probably is not the exact effect that the filmmakers were trying to convey and a modern audience may reject them as “bad FX,” but I find their dreamlike gaussiness and the way that things appear and reappear to be a very effective visualization of the ever-changing thoughts and mental landscape of the antagonist. There’s so much attention to detail in so many places that are a true testament to Geoff Murphy’s work that, in spite of the production hell, this movie not only is more than functional but is in fact exceptional. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot of fun. And hey — it’s available for free right now on YouTube (with commercials). Why not? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond