John Powers

As J.B.

waits for his cronies in the getaway car, we register not just his anxiety, but his boredom.

O'Connor is a compellingly ambiguous actor.

He doesn't insist that we love him, and he commands the screen just thinking.

His gloomy-eyed J.B.

never tells us what he's after, but we sense that he's one of those quiet men who feel trapped in middle-class life and are prepared to chew off their paw to escape it.

Where many male directors might find this heroic, Reichert finds it deluded and often comical.

She can spot a narcissist at a hundred yards.

Unlike so many crime movies, The Mastermind sets the action in a very specific time and place.

Not only does Reichert give us a small Massachusetts city in all its 70s sleepy pseudo-innocence,

She keeps J.B.

and us bumping into the story's precise historical moment, with its Vietnam War on TV, street protests, and pundits talking about millions of people feeling, quote, powerlessness, cynicism, and apathy.

Words that could all apply to J.B.

As it happens, the anti-war demonstrations turn out to have a bearing on J.B.

's fate.

And in the moral logic that undergirds Reichert's work, they serve as a measure of his self-absorption.

The guy's so busy being a mastermind that he can't see what's going on around him.

Artists spend their lives trying to create things that express their own personal vision.

Yet it's one of art's cruelties that the distinctive vision that makes you special today can almost overnight make you passé.

This hard truth runs through Richard Linklater's aching comedy Blue Moon, which stars Ethan Hawke as Lawrence Hart, the genius lyricist famous between the two world wars for his witty pyrotechnics.