Summary
Kelly Reichardt reinvents the heist film as a slow-burn portrait of delusion and decline, with Josh O’Connor compelling as a man out of his depth.
Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist, observational style—refined across films like Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and First Cow—might not seem an obvious fit for a 1970s heist film. Yet in her inimitable way, Reichardt quietly reworks the genre into a laser-focused character study of a family man coming undone.
After several visits to the local Framingham Museum of Art, J.B. (Josh O’Connor) begins to spot holes in their security and concocts a plan to steal four paintings in broad daylight. While his wife Terri (Alana Haim) works and cares for their two children, J.B. assembles a crew of semi-inept accomplices and sets the plan in motion.
As the theft makes headlines and the police begin closing in, J.B.’s lack of foresight starts to show, and his world slowly unravels. At this point, Reichardt pivots gently into her own kind of road movie, shifting the mood from suburban malaise to a broader sense of dislocation. This is how a heist film becomes wholly a Reichardt entity.
Her pacing is typically restrained. A standout sequence sees J.B. hiding the stolen works in a barn loft. With cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt—her regular collaborator since Meek’s Cutoff—Reichardt holds the camera on O’Connor as he methodically climbs a ladder, hoists the paintings into a box, and then scrambles to recover when he knocks the ladder down. Once he’s on the road, those long, meditative bus rides draw out the character’s interiority.
The backdrop is an America deep in the Vietnam War, with mounting public dissent and an increasing number of people opting out or dropping out. (By coincidence, my screening of this film directly followed Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko, which also captures fragments of the same cultural moment.)
As J.B. brushes up against these larger shifts, it becomes clear he’s been living in a bubble, his mediocrity long subsidised by his mother (Hope Davis). Reichardt’s final note is winkingly wry, a reminder of how much dry humour has been simmering beneath the surface all along. As she pulls back just enough to let the absurdity register, we realise the film wasn’t about a man in trouble: it was a joke at his expense all along. After all, it’s right there in the title.
2025 | USA | DIRECTOR: Kelly Reichardt | WRITERS: Kelly Reichardt | CAST: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, John Magaro, Hope Davis, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffman | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2025, The Match Factory | RUNNING TIME: 110 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 4-15 June 2025 (SFF 2025)
