I will not make a list.

Former employers used to pay me to make year-end film lists. I disliked it.

I enjoy reading other critics' year-end lists. I just don't want to make my own. It's a lot of needless pressure and people end up internet-yelling at you. Worse than that, this response: "I've never heard of the movies on this list."

Well. Now you have.

Anyway, I want to talk about the best most-recent film I've seen. I'm lucky to live in Los Angeles where December and January involves local theaters hanging on to or bringing back acclaimed and semi-acclaimed titles from the year in the hope that members of awards-giving groups will leave their homes, watch the films on big screens, and vote for them.

Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind opened in mid-October, and as I write this it's available for home viewing. But it's also on an abbreviated schedule at one of my favorite local places: Lumiere Cinema. When Alonso returned from an early October press screening, he said, "It's a sad movie about failure. You'll love it."

It's about a man named J.B. (Josh O'Connor) who, in 1970, decides to orchestrate a heist at a local suburban art museum. His plan, such as it is, is to take the paintings in broad daylight – assisted by a couple of friends and drowsy museum security guards – with the hope of selling them through a connection on the art black market.

There are gestures toward the mechanics of what happens before, during, and after a heist, but writer-director Reichardt uses them as a framework for something else, an exploration of selfishness, occasionally comic delusion, confused self-awareness, and mute justifications for criminal behavior, as J.B. digs himself deeper into a hole.

The 1970 setting allows for the punctuation of the Vietnam war and its domestic protests, resistance that turned deadly at Kent State University and now coincidentally mirrors, as of this writing, the use of U.S. state violence in the murder of an ICE protester named Renee Good in Minneapolis. But none of 1970's upheaval directly involves J.B.. He opts out. If this man were to call his actions anything, he might call it "dropping out," the mood of that era, as long as he doesn't have to go live at a commune.

But JB is too late to truly drop out. He's already married and has two kids, and his comfortably upper-middle-class parents (Hope Davis, Bill Camp) live nearby. They're disappointed in him. So is his wife (Alana Haim, not talking much, but whose series of exhausted stares make for a full meal of a performance). So are the friends (John Magaro, Gaby Hoffman) who allow JB to crash with them when he eventually goes on the lam.

In one sense, J.B.'s departure from the people in his shrinking circle is the one thing he does that will actually make their lives better in the long run. He's a guy who wants to provide for his family, but memorably, so he does a little crime and, seemingly intentionally, fucks it up, as though the real seductive force was the chance to turn himself into nothing.

The Mastermind isn't lighter on dialogue than any other Reichardt film, but it's certainly not where the action is. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt's moody gray color palette and encroaching darkness work on behalf of J.B.'s interior story – O'Connor almost disappears in certain low-light scenes – and that representation of malaise isolates him more and more as he runs from anything that might resemble a reasonable path forward.

Meanwhile, discomfort registers all over O'Connor's body and face, his voice small and often petulant. They're minor key performance gestures that add up to a portrait of a person who might once have felt like he had something to prove to himself and others, but with each decision courts diminishment and expectations unmet, hand in hand with a state of mind – the product of a privilege slowly dissipating – giving him permission to locate himself outside of those expectations, owing nothing to anyone, until he is quite literally whisked away.