Ab Film Review & The Last New Wave

If there's one filmmaker who has left a mark more than any other on my life, it's been Kelly Reichardt. Through her work, I've gleaned an understanding of what American life through the ages is like. From the pioneer days captured with a desolate despair in Meek's Cutoff, to the heart shattering singularity of Wendy and Lucy, to the manner that taste and fortune appear in opportunistic ways in First Cow, and now, with her latest film The Mastermind, we see a nation at another nexus point, pushed by the Vietnam War and a changing society to be something different, something possibly more equal.The Mastermind is a bit of a heist film, but it's a heist film in the way that First Cow was a heist film, meaning, the nature of the heist is almost perfunctory in that while it's the instigating action for the film, it's the outcomes of the heist that throws Josh O'Connor's James Blaine Mooney life into disarray. Not that his life wasn't in some level of disarray with the feckless out of work father mooching off his pa