John Powers

Ever since The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston's 1950 film about a jewel robbery, audiences and filmmakers have loved heist movies.

You get the precise laying out of the plan, the robbery itself, the roaring getaway, and the moment that things go wrong.

There's always a snafu.

A good heist movie offers the exacting pleasures of both the crime and the plot unfolding like clockwork.

The clock comes unsprung in The Mastermind, the latest film from Kelly Reichert, whose devoutly un-Hollywood movies are as admired by critics as they are underseen by the public.

Working with a deliberate approach all her own, she here takes the classic heist story, gives it a few tugs and shrugs, and winds up with a funny, sad movie that gets stronger and more original as it goes along.

Set in 1970s Massachusetts and inspired by an art theft back then, the mastermind centers on James Blaine Mooney, called J.B., a suburban family guy played by Josh O'Connor, who you'll know as the young, awkward, not very likable Prince Charles on The Crown.

Quiet and hard to read behind his scruffy beard, J.B.

is an unemployed cabinetmaker who exudes an air of unearned superiority.

He's distant with his wife, played by Ilana Haim, wheedles money from his indulgent mother, that's the great Hope Davis, and feels disdain for his Philistine father, played by Bill Camp, a judge who hectors his son for not getting ahead.

Pleased with his own cleverness, the movie's title is Scoffing, J.B.

enlists some dumb pals to help him rob the local museum and make off with four paintings by abstract artist Arthur Dove.

Though his plan is simple and rather silly.

Put on your pantyhose masks, fellas.

It's doable in the era before 24-7 high-tech surveillance.

Here, after the cocky JB tells his two buddies how they'll grab the paintings, they express some doubts, and he tries to reassure them.

As you can tell, these aren't exactly the pros who just stole the crown jewels from the Louvre.

Still, they do get away with the paintings.

But once J.B.

has the art in hand, this spoiled man-child finds himself plunged into a real world of cops and gangsters and life on the run.