Newsletter: Indie Focus: Nothing’s as it seems with ‘Miss Stevens,’ ‘Kate Plays Christine’ or ‘Blair Witch’

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

The team that assembled to cover the Toronto International Film Festival has already dispersed to our separate corners, secret lairs, undisclosed locations and parts unknown. But the coverage won’t stop, as all of us left with lots of stories that will keep coming between now and who knows when. To keep up with the interviews, photos, videos and all of our coverage, go to latimes.com/toronto.

Because who wants to spend a night at home when you can spend it with friends at the movies, we’ve got two screenings booked for this week. On Sept. 19 is “The Dressmaker” with a Q&A with director Jocelyn Moorhouse and producer Sue Maslin and then on the 21^st is the documentary “Amanda Knox” with directors Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn.

Check events.latimes.com for more info about upcoming events.

‘Miss Stevens’

One of my favorite movies at the SXSW film festival earlier this year was “Miss Stevens,” the directorial debut for Julia Hart. (The movie was written by Hart and Jordan Horowitz. They’re married and Horowitz is also a producer on the much anticipated “La La Land.”) “Miss Stevens” features a dazzlingly delicate performance by Lily Rabe, who portrays a young woman trying to pull herself out of a tailspin of grief and confusion. But that maybe makes the movie sound heavier than it is, as its mix of airy lightness and real emotional gravity is a rare alchemy.

“In a lot of ways, the movie is about two things for me,” Hart said to me in the spring. “It’s about performance and the power of art to get you through the tough stuff, but it’s also about growing up and letting go.”

And I don’t know that I’ve done this before, but I will ask you to kindly disregard the Times review from my esteemed colleague Gary Goldstein. (Sorry, Gary!) The movie didn’t connect with him, but maybe you’ll feel differently. I know I did.

At the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri wrote: “Hart portrays the unquantifiable nature of disappointment, success and adulthood. It’s a tight, unnerving and deceptively complex movie about broken people just managing to get by, and at the center of it all is Rabe’s transfixing presence.”

At Indiewire, David Ehrlich wrote: “The skill and sensitivity with which Hart teases that pain to the surface is a major reason why ‘Miss Stevens’ is consistently more rewarding than so many of the other small, sweet American indies that mine similar territory.”

‘Kate Plays Christine’

The documentary “Kate Plays Christine” is a twisting, shifting piece of work, constantly reorienting the viewer. Directed by Robert Greene, “Kate Plays Christine” follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she researches a portrayal of Christine Chubbuck, the Florida newscaster who committed suicide on live TV in 1974.

Except there is no other movie for Sheil, only this one, an examination of acting, personality, fiction, documentary, storytelling and the public’s fascination with morbid spectacle. The film’s unsettled, unsettling ending may wind up as one of the defining cinematic moments of the year.

In his review for The Times, Robert Abele said the film “makes for a twisty, unsettling probe into our fascination with transforming lives, and deaths, into digestible storytelling.”

At BuzzFeed, Alison Willmore wrote: “‘Kate Plays Christine’ is an exercise about storytelling, but it’s also one about empathy and turning someone’s life into a statement.”

Eric Hynes, who was on location for the film’s production, detailed for Film Comment.

When the film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Steve Zeitchik and myself both wrote about it.

“It’s a horrifying, sensational story that immediately makes you question what you even want to know about it,” Greene said at the time. “It feels more and more awful. This woman doing this thing for this reason brings up all these questions that I can’t shake.”

‘Blair Witch’

Director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett are favorites around these parts. I wrote about their previous collaborations “You’re Next” and “The Guest” and was as surprised as anyone when it was revealed at Comic-Con over the summer that their new project “The Woods” was in fact a secret sequel to be titled “Blair Witch.”

I was at the Midnight Madness screening of the new film in Toronto. After the movie, Wingard said, “For me, the main thing that I remember from the original film as an audience member is just how authentic it felt. … So for me the main thing that was important was that we live up to that commitment towards reality.”

From Comic-Con, Jen Yamato for the Daily Beast wrote: “It’s not a reboot or a prequel or an alternate timeline re-quel, but an old-fashioned straight-up sequel that continues the frights first established in Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 film while expanding the ‘Blair Witch’-verse in wildly inventive and unexpected ways.”

Now that the film is hitting theaters, the reviews have been, shall we say, less kind. For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “If nothing else, ‘Blair Witch,’ a so-so new entry in the found-footage freakout subgenre initiated nearly two decades ago by ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ suggests that the gimmicky franchise resuscitation is not strictly the domain of the major studios. But to be fair, it’s also one of the few examples of this dispiriting trend that does, from time to time, elicit your admiration for the cheeky inventiveness of the filmmaking instincts on display.”

In her review for Time, Stephanie Zacharek noted, “Your enjoyment of ‘Blair Witch’ depends mightily on your tolerance for watching annoying people get the pants scared off them in the woods.”

Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.