crime drama

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

Amateur (1994)

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“How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?”
“I’m choosy.”

The Criterion Channel has been doing a great job of resurrecting a forgotten generation of once-respected Gen-X indie filmmakers whose work has been weirdly difficult to see in recent years – names like Atom Egoyan, Gregg Araki, and Hal Hartley.  During the glory days of independent film festivals and college radio chic, these low-budget, mid-notoriety auteurs enjoyed a surprising level of cultural mystique that has faded as the distribution of their work has effectively trickled into non-existence.  Maybe that break wasn’t all so bad for their memory & reputation, though.  Revisiting Hal Hartley’s filmography as a Criterion Channel micro-collection in the streaming age feels like taking a time machine back to the Classic Indie Filmmaking days of the 1990s.  In particular, there’s something charmingly quaint about how his low-effort crime picture Amateur functions as a relic of that era.  Every one of his characters loiter around public spaces smoking cigarettes, flipping through porno mags, and making deadpan quips over background tracks by PJ Harvey & Liz Phair.  It’s cute in its own grimy little way, a dusty souvenir of 90s slacker kitsch.

The “amateur” of the title could refer to any one of the main players in Hartley’s off-Broadway, on-camera stage drama.  Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun who’s learning a new trade as a writer of porno-mag erotica.  Elina Löwensohn plays a video store porno actress who’s trying to break away from the industry by making big moves as a self-employed gangster.  Martin Donovan is caught between them as a total amnesiac with a violent past – an amateur at basically everything due to his newfound medical condition.  The unlikely trio eventually find themselves “on the run from bloodthirsty corporate assholes” as they cross paths with the gangsters at the top of the porno industry food chain, a mistake that has them evading handcuffs & bullets.  This premise sounds like it might make for an exciting, sordid action thriller—and maybe it still could—but that kind of entertainment is not on Amateur‘s agenda.  Mostly, Hartley uses the plot as an excuse to have his characters lounge around in hip NYC fashions (styled as a relapsed Catholic pervert, a soft goth, and a business prick, respectfully) while listening to college radio classics by the likes of The Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and My Blood Valentine.

There might be some genuine thematic heft in Amateur that I’m not taking seriously here, something about how New York City is a dangerous playground where desperate transplants reinvent themselves.  That might have resonated with me more if it were NYC community theatre instead of a Hal Hartley film preserved in time.  I mostly found myself distracted by just how Totally ’90s the movie was in its search for contemporary cool cred.  Its gigantic cellphones, breakfast diner ashtrays, and business cards for phone sex lines were all just as specific to its status as an Indie 90s relic as its single-scene cameo from a loud-mouthed Parker Posey.  This is a movie with multiple recurring arguments about why “floppy discs” are neither floppy, nor circular.  Everyone is either absurdly angry or wistfully despondent in a perfectly Gen-X 90s kind of way, and there’s a lot of easy humor pulled from the clash between those two default attitudes.  It’s an easy era to feel nostalgia for as a movie nerd, if not only because people like Hartley, Egoyan, and Araki used to get relatively robust distribution & critical attention, as opposed to the current cinematic landscape where you’re either making over-advertised corporate IP slop or disposable streaming service filler.  We used to be a country, a proper country with a proper indie cinema scene, and the proof is currently streaming on Criterion.

-Brandon Ledet

Capone (2020)

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I’m not sure that Josh Trank bounced back from his career-imploding misfire Fant4stic (2015) with a better film, but he’s certainly returning to the scene with a more memorable & entertaining one. Trank’s misshapen Al Capone biopic stands alone in a genre defined only one other film to date: Venom (2018), by which I mean it’s a tragically bland nothing of a movie that Tom Hardy’s bizarro performance transforms into a riotous good time through sheer force of will. Trank wrote, directed, and edited Capone himself, so you think you’d be able to credit some of the film’s entertainment value to his guiding hand. Yet, his dialogue, direction, and editing choices are all so aggressively uninteresting that it’s a miracle any audience could sit through the entire picture without slipping into a coma. Tom Hardy alone is the source of that miracle, and it’s his batshit performance that transforms Capone into something truly remarkable, even if just remarkably laughable.

Capone covers only the final year of the notorious gangster’s life, which he spent under house arrest while left senile by neurosyphilis at the age of 48. Trank attempts to use this syphilitic madness as a device that allows the narrative to surreally drift through time & space as Capone’s mind wanders through his own memories, feeling immense guilt over the violence he commissioned at the height of his Chicago crime boss days. There’s no sense of purpose or immersive atmosphere to these drifts through Capone’s subconscious, though. When the movie’s over you’re left pondering if it had anything to say about violence, guilt, syphilis, Capone, or anything at all. The movie has no discernible reason to exist except in giving Tom Hardy the freedom to run wild in the titular role. Luckily for Trank, Hardy more than makes up for any & all filmmaking deficiencies by turning Capone into a one-man freak show. Against all odds, the film truly is a spectacle.

With none of the film’s stylistic or narrative elements being compelling enough to get in his way, Tom Hardy is given the greenlight to transform Capone into a series of Nic Cagian stunts. His demented vision of the titular gangster is horrifically grotesque. He mumbles incoherently in a garbled growl more appropriate for a talking trash can than a human being. He dresses in old biddy drag, fires pistols at alligators, belts out his showtunes from The Wizard of Oz, and fires a gold-plated Tommy gun at his friends & family while aimlessly wandering the grounds of his mansion in a soiled diaper. Admittedly, all these stunts were written into the screenplay, so it’s not as if Hardy ad-libbed the film’s saving graces. He’s just responsible for making them fun to watch in a bewildering sideshow act kind of way that we normally only allow Nic Cage to perform. It has got to be the most compelling, amusingly outrageous performance you’ll ever see where a main character pisses, shits, and pukes themselves for the entire runtime while staring directly at the audience with grotesquely bloodshot eyes.

I’m embarrassed by how much fun I had with Capone. By most reasonable metrics, it’s a terrible film, one that’s only dragged down by the eye-rolling decisions made by its commanding auteur. Why hire El-P to produce a score if his work is going to be so anonymous that the audience forgets that factoid immediately after seeing his name in the opening credits? Why cast eternally loveable performers like Linda Cardellini & Kyle MaClachlan just so they can sit around watching Tom Hardy do his thing? Why the fuck do you think the world needs a ~spooky~ rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “Blueberry Hill?” Who is any of this for? It ultimately doesn’t matter. All things considered, this is a much more memorable, entertaining, and overly ambitious take on the pathetic-mobster-geezer-regretting-his-evil-deeds story than the infinitely more competent The Irishman, so it really doesn’t matter how it got there. I would watch Tom Hardy shit his pants on an infinite loop if the results were always going to be this fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Black Mass (2015)

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EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

What the hell has Johnny Depp been doing for the last decade? It used to be that every new Depp performance was worth getting excited about, but the last time I can remember being impressed with him was as the notorious reprobate John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester in 2004’s The Libertine. Everything since feels like a formless blur of pirates, Tontos, and CGI chameleons. No matter. Depp has returned to his past life as a solid, exciting actor in another formally middling biopic packed to the gills with great performances, Black Mass. With his receding hairline, hideous teeth, ever-present aviators & pinky rings, and eyes so grey-blue they almost make him look blind, Depp plays the infamous South Boston crimelord Whitey Bulger like a strange cross between Hunter S. Thompson & Nosferatu. It’s a measured, but menacing performance that proves Depp still has it in him to terrify & captivate, completely transforming beyond recognition & losing himself in his best role of the past decade.

The worst accusation that can be thrown at Black Mass is that it’s a little formally & narratively overfamiliar. The film doesn’t bring anything particularly fresh to the 70s-era organized crime drama format, calling to mind works from names like Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, and Martin Scorsese in nearly every scene. In fact, because of the thick Boston accents inherent to Whitey Bulger & The Winter Hill Gang it’s easy to pinpoint a specific point of reference in Scorsese’s oeuvre that Black Mass can be accused of being a little too reminiscent of: The Departed. Just know that if you’re looking forward to this film as a fan of that genre there’s not going to be long stretches of brutal violence & gunfire that usually accompany organized crime films. Black Mass has its moments of brutality, sure, limited mostly to bursts of fist to face sadism & quick bursts of assassination, but for the most part it’s a calm story of political intrigue. The movie is almost entirely focused on the real-life Bulger’s secretive “alliance” with the FBI that allowed the two agencies to work together to eradicate the Italian mafia from Boston, making room for Bulger to bloom from a small time crime boss into an all-powerful kingpin. Black Mass is concerned with the audio surveillance tapes, buried/forged paperwork, and back alley dealings with the federal government that allowed for Bulger’s rise to power much more than it is with his murderous deeds, which amount to exactly one onscreen shooting & two strangling on Depp’s bloody hands. Bulger is terrifying, but the threat he poses is more systemic than it is physical, making for a film that may have defied the more bloodthirsty expectations of its audience. I noticed quite a few viewers at our screening checking their cellphones in the second & third acts . . .

Any muted expectations I had for Black Mass based on its 70s-era crime drama familiarity (an aesthetic that somehow hilariously continues well into the 90s in the film’s timeline) were surpassed merely on the merit of its performances. Besides Depp’s horrifying, career-revitalizing turn as Whitey Bulger, there’s also great, unexpected screen presence from Kevin Bacon, Adam Scott, Dakota Johnson, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Sarsgaard, and, my personal favorite, Julianne Nichlson (who was fantastic in both Boardwalk Empire & Masters of Sex and whom I only want the best things for). This is an actor’s movie. The 70s crime pastiche is merely a backdrop for the absurdly talented cast’s parade of heavy Boston accents & emotional turmoil. The screenplay offers very little in terms of surprise. Of course Bulger is the kind of gangster that is gentle & neighborly with old ladies, but will have a man killed for threatening to punch him in a bar. Of course, despite his official status as a “top echelon informant”, he’s prone to saying things like, “I don’t consider this ratting or informing. This is business.” Of course, because this is a gangster movie, the script is a long procession of a million “fuck”s, one with just a few homophobic & anti-Italian slurs thrown in there for good measure. I consistently got the feeling that we’ve all seen this play out countless times before, but I still enjoyed it a great deal. Just as a particularly corrupt FBI agent justifies his involvement with Bulger as “a little white lie to protect the bigger truth”, Black Mass is a little, unassuming movie worthwhile for how it supports such a massive list of excellent performances, Depp’s return to form, believe it or not, being just one drop in the bucket.

-Brandon Ledet