This article appeared in the June 4, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025)

On the final Saturday of the Cannes Film Festival—a day of repeat screenings of Competition films that culminates with the awards ceremony—I woke up in my apartment to no lights, no Wi-Fi, no AC. I stepped out for a coffee, only to be told that espresso machines weren’t working; getting breakfast was also impossible without any cash, because card readers were out of order. A power cut had hit the region earlier that morning, sowing chaos; cinemas had reportedly gone dark in the midst of screenings. Walking around Cannes’s cobbled streets in search of sustenance, rifling through my pockets for a stray euro or two, I felt like the scruffy protagonist of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which had just premiered the night before. In Reichardt’s delightful caper, set in the 1970s, Josh O’Connor plays J.B., an art-school dropout who orchestrates a comically sloppy heist at a Massachusetts museum. He enlists a couple of bumbling friends to steal four paintings by Arthur Dove, the early American modernist painter, and then spends most of the movie on the lam—which is to say, he shuffles around with a hangdog face, seeking refuge with old friends and in motels, scrounging around desperately for bus fare.

The Mastermind is a marvelous dilation of the heist movie, which typically compresses and elides time: the clock ticks, the deadline approaches, and multiple timelines and narratives crisscross into a single, hurtling, tunnel-visioned mission. Reichardt, an ardent admirer of the work of experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton, once said in an interview with Film Comment that “to slow time is a political movement.” Her 16mm-shot crime thriller borrows from durational cinema: it pools and trickles along in the hot New England summer sun, with bursts of a clangy, percussive jazz score punctuating the languor. In the movie’s best gag (and there are many good ones), the hatchback of J.B.’s getaway car has to be hand-cranked open to stash the paintings, inserting an ungainly pause into the heist. J.B. desires a narrative pace that the movie, and life, refuse him. Throughout the film, TV and radio broadcasts, graffiti and posters, and side conversations all draw our attention to the protests raging in 1970s America, particularly on campuses, during the Vietnam War—in the midst of which, our hero’s plot seems particularly petty and inconsequential, a self-righteous quest for some things of beauty.

J.B.’s malaise called to mind the protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975): a reporter in a war-torn African country who embarks on a strange, identity-swapping con that seems motivated by boredom more than anything else. In both films, bourgeois protagonists seem to mistake their passivity in a call-to-arms historical moment for powerlessness, and contrive (mis)adventures to escape the alienation of privilege. But there are no timelines and character arcs in life; everything happens all at once. In The Mastermind, the manner in which the political context ultimately swallows J.B. is one of the funniest, sharpest moments I saw on screen at Cannes this year, and one that spoke forcefully to its very context—to being at a film festival while student-led, anti-war protests rage worldwide and news of faraway violence arrives in an endless, ruthless stream. For the last three years, I’ve been attending Cannes and writing somewhat indignant reports on the contradictions that surround the festival. But The Mastermind says all there is to say, with a twinkle in its eye: there is no escape from our shared present.

Later that Saturday, I learned that the power blackout was suspected to be an act of sabotage, similar to the one that disrupted rail lines on the opening day of the Paris Olympics last year. As much as art and capital may contrive bubbles within which we can naïvely chase things of beauty, the real world invariably intrudes.

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At Cannes, that bubble is kept alive by constant reminders of the “power of cinema”—the ability of the movies to bring people together, transform minds, and revolutionize the world. The more hermetic the festival gets, the more insistent these platitudes become. “If there is a place in the world where civic cinema exists, it is in the Festival de Cannes,” said French actor Laurent Lafitte, master of ceremonies at this year’s edition. “[Art] is the powerful witness of our lives and our dreams, and we, the audience, embrace it,” said Juliette Binoche, the president of the Competition jury. “May the Festival de Cannes, where everything can shift, contribute to this.” In truth, very little shifts at Cannes other than the fortunes of the people (and companies) in attendance, but one must justify spending two weeks (and a lot of money) watching movies and eating bad food in the South of France. This year, this self-important strain of cinephilia ran through the movies in the Official Competition, too. Gratingly so in Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, an insipid retelling of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 touchstone Breathless. In Carla Simón’s Romería and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, cinema repairs familial bonds and heals old traumas; in Bi Gan’s Resurrection, movies are imagined as precious, Faustian fantasies worth indulging in exchange for years of our lives.

But the real love letter to cinema in this year’s lineup has no pretensions about the medium as a force for good or evil. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is set in Brazil in 1977, in the throes of a military dictatorship under which communists were murdered and imprisoned, and violence reigned. A researcher, played by Wagner Moura, returns to his (and Mendonça’s) hometown of Recife, purportedly to spend time with his son and father-in-law during the raucous celebrations of Carnaval. But we soon learn that he is a fugitive, being persecuted by a vicious administration in cahoots with corrupt oligarchs and local cops, and hopes to flee the country with his young son. Mendonça is as much a critic and a cinephile as he is a director, and his movies are always rife with references and canny homages to films of the past—Hollywood, Brazilian, European, and more. Yet cinema, in his work, is a kind of logic more than an object or conduit—a means through which we organize the world and our understanding of it. His wonderful Pictures of Ghosts from 2023 charted a personal and political history of the movie palaces of Recife throughout the years. Rather than a maudlin or nostalgic paean, it was a deeply researched reflection on the medium’s narrative and material existence: how it endures in the individual and collective mind; how it endures as a vehicle of history and soft power.

The movies pervade The Secret Agent. Many sequences take place at a cinema where the father-in-law runs the projection booth. Early in the film, a leg is found in the mouth of a shark; Jaws (1975) is in theaters, and this grisly image spins into an urban legend dramatized in a fantastic horror-movie sequence that takes cues from The Hand (1960). That set piece is a kind of aside, both stylistically and thematically, diverting us from the main plot momentarily to touch upon the abuse of LGBTQ individuals during the dictatorship and beyond. The film is dense with such asides. There are Mozambican freedom fighters in exile hiding alongside our hero; there are indigenous workers railing against their exploitation by the ruling class; there are small-time and big-time crooks caught up in their own internecine class battles. They all feel like people, rather than characters, with stories and lives that stretch far beyond the film’s widescreen images, shot using anamorphic Panavision lenses. That even the ultimate fate of our protagonist is never seen on-screen, and only appears as a kind of footnote, poignantly reinforces the key theme of The Secret Agent: history sprawls beyond what is documented and archived, and there are some stories and people who survive only in memories.

Two other movies at Cannes turned to the politics of forgetting: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha and Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors. Ducornau’s much-awaited follow-up to her Palme d’Or–winning Titane (2021) earned more brickbats than bouquets among the critics I encountered, and admittedly for good reason. The ’90s-set dystopian thriller follows a doctor (Golshifteh Farahani), her 13-year-old daughter (Mélissa Boros), and her junkie brother (Tahar Rahim) as they confront a society ravaged by an illness that turns people into marble statues. The film is both on-the-nose and overly oblique: it is riddled with mysteries that feel more like plot holes; it mounts what seems like an AIDS allegory (the marbling disease spreads via sex and needles) but without any clear political or historical correspondences; past and present blur together in two timelines that are separated for unclear reasons.

Yet at a Cannes that often left me feeling cold, subjected time and again to overly constructed and instrumentalized movies, Alpha filled me with feeling. The more the film’s logic frays, the more you realize this is a movie about mourning—about the task of remembering and grieving unspeakable and inexplicable losses, and the irrational ways in which we hold on to them. In a final image, a sort of emblem for letting go, Farahani’s character allows her brother to be whisked away by a desert storm; he crumbles into dust as she sobs, and her daughter watches from the car. I cannot say I understood what exactly happened, but understanding is overrated in cinema. I felt, so deeply, the sensation of clinging to a person—or a memory—that feels like sand, and witnessing a loss that literally tears at the fabric of your comprehension of this world.

In Loznitsa’s return to narrative fiction, nothing eludes comprehension. Throughout Two Prosecutors, a taut political drama set in 1937, near the beginning of the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union, one has the sense of watching a meteor hurtling in slow motion toward a world-ending collision. A series of sordid events, vividly portrayed in a masterful opening sequence, leads to a new, young prosecutor (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) receiving a note from a political prisoner—written in blood—about the abuses of the NKVD, the secret police under Stalin. What ensues is a story of remarkable simplicity elongated by Kafkaesque limbos: the prosecutor visits the prisoner, and then, appalled at what he learns, goes to the attorney general in Moscow to complain. The young man insists on procedure, citing rules and regulations at each turn, often insistently in the face of casual dismissal; in a key scene, he explains the Roman law principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” Despite the story essentially being a fait accompli, the fact that I hoped against hope for a different ending is the marvel of the movie. Loznitsa films in long, tableau-like compositions, where absurdity enters the frame every now and then, rippling reality, teasing the possibility that fiction might intervene in the inevitable. But as in The Mastermind, there is no way out.