The Mastermind

Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is masterly in the way it creates characters with their rhythms and impulses, building on them with one surprise after another, till you have no idea where things are headed — there is only a tiny instance in which the director telegraphs a punch, but that is so fleeting that you barely have time to notice it, and it’s gone. The Competition section began with Mascha Schilinski’s The Sound Of Falling, a beguiling intergenerational saga of female despair and desire. It has ended with The Mastermind, a bumbling caper cum character-study which has the director’s distinctive interplay between drollery and sharp observational skills. It has climbed to the top of a slate crowded with solid films, including Joachim Trier’s moving family drama Sentimental Value, all contenders for the Palme d’Or.