Review: Josh O'Connor excels as a half-smart crook in the gently mocking 'The Mastermind'

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Kelly Reichardt’s watchful cinema is one of the indie world’s most exquisite bounties, a space for pioneers ( “Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow” ), artists ( “Showing Up” ) and wanderers (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy” ) who command your attention the way an ER waiting room does, lingering tensely.

One might not consider a heist film in such anthropological terms. And yet “The Mastermind,” Reichardt’s latest and one of her best, while set in motion by a daylight art grab orchestrated by Josh O’Connor ’s middle-class Massachusetts suburbanite, is another precisely turned Reichardt movie: honest, sad, funny and inherently philosophical about our engagement with the world. As you migh