“The Mastermind” (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2025)

MUBI’s December slate is the strongest they’ve put out all year, combining the company’s major first-run releases — including “Die My Love” — with major 2025 standouts (“Afternoons of Solitude”), a slew of canonical favorites (Godard’s “Alphaville,” Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”), and indie sensation “Hundreds of Beavers” just for good measure. Our pick of the month is one of the best MUBI releases of the year, and my favorite Kelly Reichardt movie since “Certain Women.” Here’s a taste of Ryan Lattanzio on “The Mastermind”:

“When the jazzy, jittery opening of Kelly Reichardt’s ‘The Mastermind’ begins with slow, vertically crawling title cards in Bauhaus-like font, you know you’re about to be thrown back in cinematic time.

“Shot on film with the grainy warmth that evokes a sleepy 1970 New England municipality as much as it does actual movies from the ‘70s, ‘The Mastermind’ is Reichardt’s version of a heist movie — meaning that the filmmaker hijacks conventions laid by filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville and Sidney Lumet for a spin that still retains her patient bent for long, luxuriating takes. Here, Josh O’Connor plays J.B. Mooney (what a name!), an art thief who falls down a hole of his own digging, as a poorly hatched job to rip off a series of Arthur Dove abstract paintings from a fictional Massachusetts museum sends his private and family lives careening out of his grasp.

“‘The Mastermind’ is more an aftermath-of-a-heist movie than one about the job’s high-stakes particulars, though Reichardt captures them with breath-bating suspense in the film’s first act. Reichardt, writing her own script, is more invested in the what-happens-after, the slow-drip comedown of J.B.’s catastrophic hubris in thinking he could carry out a grab-and-run robbery in such a small town. Especially when his father (Bill Camp, hilariously curmudgeonly as an old-guard type who sticks his nose up at modern art) is its local judge.”

Available to stream December 12

Other highlights:

– “Hundreds of Beavers” (12/1)
– “Afternoons of Solitude” (12/5)
– “Die My Love” (12/23)