While shuffling into the AMC theatre for “Wake Up Dead Man”, Rian Johnson’s upcoming third entry in his “Knives Out” film series, I overheard two young people talking about Josh O’Connor, who plays Jud Duplenticy, a young priest accused of murder at a fictional upstate New York parish. O’Connor, the pair excitedly discussed, seemed primed to be the next big thing in cinema since (according to them) bursting onto the scene in “Challengers” in 2024. They were both looking forward to seeing how we fit into Johnson’s oeuvre.

At first, the idea of considering “Challengers” as his breakthrough seemed absurd. Since his phenomenal performance as a sheep farmer struggling with his sexuality eight years ago in “God’s Own Country”, O’Connor has been one of the most dependable performers in independent cinema. But the world of a film critic is different from the world of the average kind of audience filmgoer, and it was instructive to be faced so directly with the realisation that despite a respectable cadre of films and despite his Emmy win as a young Prince Charles on Netflix’s “The Crown”, O’Connor has yet to pierce the consciousness of the commercial film audience. If 2024’s breathless online obsession with sweaty bodies in Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” was a significant step toward stardom for him, then perhaps the endlessly popular “Knives Out” series might present even newer opportunities for audiences.

I had lined up for a very different kind of Josh O’Connor film with a very different kind of festival audience. “The Mastermind”, the new film from noted minimalist and slow-cinema maestro Kelly Reichardt, features O’Connor as James Blaine (JB), a careless, restless carpenter from a privileged family, who decides to stage an art heist from a suburban museum in 1970s Massachusett