Indie Focus: A week of Lakeith Stanfield with ‘Crown Heights’ and ‘Death Note,’ plus ‘Beach Rats’

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

Times critics Kenneth Turan and Justin Chang put together a list of 35 films from the last 20 years that they believe to be buried treasures. The list includes 25 films they agree on, and they each include five more of their own.

As Chang explained, “This is not a ‘best films’ list; nor is it meant to be in any way definitive. Its purpose is simply to shed light on a group of films that have meant something to us over the past two decades or so, and which — despite critical championing or, in some cases, because of critical indifference — never quite drew the audience attention and awards recognition they should have.”

Among the entries given a separate spotlight are Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution,” Ava DuVernay’s “Middle of Nowhere” and Richard Kwietniowski’s “Love and Death on Long Island.”

And, while not our usual area of coverage here, Times music critic Randall Roberts put together an astonishing package of stories on the musical legacy of the Sunset Strip that’s just too cool not to spotlight. For a movie angle, there is an interview with impresario, producer and club owner Lou Adler, although it doesn’t mention the 1982 rock ’n’ roll youth rebellion movie he directed, “Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains.”

We are hard at work on lining up some screenings for the fall prestige season. To find out more and for updates on future events, go to events.latimes.com.

‘Crown Heights’

Winner of the audience award in the U.S. Dramatic competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Crown Heights” is based on the true story of Colin Warner, who would spend 20 years in jail for a crime he did not commit, and Carl King, the friend who would work tirelessly for his release. Written and directed by Matt Ruskin, the film stars Lakeith Stanfield, in the middle of an astonishing run of recent performances, and Nnamdi Asomugha.

In his review for The Times, Turan wrote that the film “demonstrates what a miscarriage of justice feels like from the inside, becoming a powerful indictment of how much damage a heedless and uncaring system can do to an impotent individual caught in its grinding wheels. And while issues of institutional racism and class play a undeniable part in the story, ‘Crown Heights’ is more potent for not foregrounding them, for letting us experience for ourselves how stacked society’s deck can be.”

The Times’ Tre’vell Anderson spoke to Asomugha, a former NFL player who appears in the film as an actor and is also a producer. While that makes for an unusual trajectory from the outside, Asomugha spoke about what both he and other people can take from the movie.

“They can go into this film really blind to the fact that this happens and see that a real human went through this,” he said. “What Carl taught me is that one person can do it, galvanize a community to follow you and right that wrong.”

In the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote that the “choice to focus on Colin rather than on his persecutors is an honorable and ethical one, and ‘Crown Heights’ is a moving tribute to his resilience and the steadfastness of the people who love him.”

‘Death Note’

Based on a popular Japanese manga series, the new film “Death Note” seems to many to be most notable for the way it transposed its story to Seattle, bringing out cries of whitewashing. Filmmaker Adam Wingard has long been a favorite with the smart genre crowd, and so the movie deserves a closer look. Nat Wolff stars as a young man given the power of life or death over others, with a cast that also includes Stanfield, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Paul Nakuchi.

Reviewing the film for the Los Angeles Times, Noel Murray said, “Rather than completely re-imagining the source material, Wingard and the writers have dragged along too much of the original’s sprawling plot and cultural trappings .… But this ‘Death Note’ is snappily paced to a fault. For a film 10 years in the making, it sure feels like everyone involved is in a hurry to get it over with.”

The Times’ Jen Yamato spoke to Wingard for an upcoming story about the controversy surrounding the film, but also how, for a filmmaker like himself, the recent emergence of Netflix as a production outlet has been meaningful. As he said, “I think to a certain degree you have to consider that any type of Netflix thing is more about discovery than it is about put”ting it out there. A lot of my favorite films are like that — I’m a big John Carpenter fan and a lot of his movies never really got appreciated for some time. It’s not about the immediacy, it’s about the longevity.”

In the New York Times, Jeanette Catsoulis added, “Mr. Wingard’s eye for a stylish image hasn’t dimmed. Working with the cinematographer David Tattersall, he concocts sequences that tilt and drift, awash in neon and a soundtrack that evokes a woozy, winking romanticism. At certain moments, we can almost feel his desire to shrug off the straitjacket of fidelity and make this tale of false gods and flawed superheroes completely his own.”

At Buzzfeed, Alison Willmore noted, “For all of the film’s weaknesses, it’s still fair to say that ‘Death Note’ is one of the best American adaptations of anime and manga to date, because the bar has been set so very low. It is, at least, a project whose problems aren’t related to a condescension to or bewilderment by its source material.”

‘Beach Rats’

Following up on the promise of her first feature, “It Felt Like Love,” filmmaker Eliza Hittman’s new film is the remarkably assured “Beach Rats.” The film which captures the hazy wanderings of a youthful summer alongside the story of a young man (Harris Dickinson) exploring of his own sexual identity.

In his review for The Times, Chang noted that “the film is so skilled at telling its story through visual detail and atmosphere” before adding of the film’s ending, “It’s a shocking yet curiously inevitable turn of events, and Hittman neither soft-pedals nor exaggerates the consequences. To the end she simply keeps on looking, with a gaze as compassionate as it is unsparing, at a young man who turns out to be far more than meets the eye.”

At Vulture, Emily Yoshida said “ The film is at its best when it lets Dickinson’s deceptively blank face and Hélène Louvart’s lyrically natural cinematography tell the story, which is far more informed by mood than events .… Hittman’s skill as an impressionistic filmmaker, giving us enough glimpses that we can fill in the whole, makes for an incredibly engaging viewing experience”

And also at Vulture, Kyle Buchanan interviewed Hittman, who spoke about the response she’s gotten as a female filmmaker taking on issues of male identity when she said, “sSo many movies that I love about women through film history have been directed by men. I’ve never owned my representation as a woman. To feel like there are things I can and can’t do in my career .… It’s a bit frustrating, but also a bit motivating. I would like to have a long career where I tackle what people think I can do and can’t do.”

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