The Mastermind review – Josh O’Connor is world’s worst art thief in Kelly Reichardt’s unlikely heist movie

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Cannes film festival Reichardt’s quietist, observational style is unexpectedly successful at creating a super-naturalistic depiction of an art gallery robbery It needs hardly be said that the title is ironic. The abject non-hero of Kelly Reichardt’s engrossingly downbeat heist movie, set in 1970s Massachusetts, is weak, vain and utterly clueless. By the end, he’s a weirdly Updikean figure, though without the self-awareness: going on the run with no money and without a change of clothes, to escape from the grotesque mess he has made for himself and his family. This is James, played with hangdog near-charm by Josh O’Connor; he is an art school dropout and would-be architectural designer with two young sons, married to Terri (a minor complaint is that the excellent Alana Haim is not given enough to do). James depends on the social standing of his father Bill, a judge, formidably played by Bill Camp, and is borrowing large sums of money from his patrician mother Sarah (Hope Davis), oste...
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Law of Tehran review – ferocious Michael Mann-style thriller of the Iranian underworld

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A barnstorming – and ultimately gruesome – opening sequence sets the grisly action-packed tone, as a morally ambiguous cop takes on a powerful drug lord

If Michael Mann made a movie in Iran it might look like this: a ferocious drama-thriller in which a haunted, morally ambiguous cop faces off with a despairing drug lord. We begin with a barnstorming chase sequence in which an officer runs after a drug dealer holding a bag of heroin; the scene climaxes with a shockingly nasty end for the dealer, setting a gruesome tone for the rest of the film.

The director is Saeed Roustayi, whose Leila’s Brothers was in competition at Cannes last year; this is in fact his previous film. Payman Maadi (from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is police officer Samad, who is losing the “war on drugs”; gangsters have murdered the son of his subordinate, so his team’s dedication to bringing down the drug dealers has a new fanatical energy. Navid Mohammadzadeh is Naser, a drug kingpin who is already feeling his dominion crumbling.

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