Newsletter: Indie Focus: A new season begins with Fall Sneaks and the Telluride Film Festival
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Before we fully fling ourselves into the fall movie season, perhaps it’s a good moment to look back. Our colleague Justin Chang recently looked at what he called “an unusually dispiriting summer at the movies” and observed that “even by the dimmest expectations of Hollywood originality, this truly was the summer of our discontent.”
I took a look at the multiplex-adjacent world of arthouse releases and came to something of an opposite conclusion. There was plenty of fresh, invigorating storytelling from both veteran filmmakers and new voices, including “Love & Friendship,” “Swiss Army Man,” “Don’t Think Twice,” “The Invitation” and “Hell or High Water.” (These titles will not be new news to dedicated readers of this newsletter, of course. We’ve had your back all summer.)
We’ve also got some exciting screenings coming up for later in September and into the fall. Check events.latimes.com for more info about upcoming events.
Fall Movie Sneaks
Strictly as a reader, I’ve always really enjoyed the Fall Movies Sneaks issue. It is always full of smart, sharp stories that help make sense of the crush of new releases throughout the season.
Rebecca Keegan spoke to Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks about the new film “Sully,” the story of pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, his famed emergency landing of a passenger jet on the Hudson River in 2009 and its aftermath.
The movie celebrates quiet, steady competence over grand heroics, which feels like no small point in the era of the comic-book super hero movies.
“I don’t know how everybody else feels, but I just long for reality rather than these made-up things,” said Eastwood. “I think younger audiences would like to see a real hero also.”
Times colleague Josh Rottenberg stepped into the ring, so to speak, with filmmaker Ben Younger about his new boxing movie, “Bleed for This,” the real-life comeback story of boxer Vinny Pazienza, played by Miles Teller.
Younger had early success but has not had a new film out in many years.
“Not that anyone told me that, but when you don’t make a movie for 10 years in Hollywood, some doors get closed. I suddenly found it personally relatable,” said Younger of Pazienza’s story.
Amy Kaufman spoke to Colin Firth about the new “Bridget Jones’ Baby.” It’s been 12 years since the previous film in the series, and as Firth noted, “I think everybody was kind of nervous because it had been such a long time since the last film. The real challenge was to not go down the same paths as in the past.”
Glenn Whipp looks at the awards odds for various fall releases.
And I spoke to the main creative team behind the adaptation of the hit novel “The Girl on the Train.” The film is a tricky mix of thriller and interior character study. As screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson said to me, “My favorite line in the screenplay is ‘the camera is drunk.’ I tried to do some drunk filmmaking, to get the film to be confused in that way. My other favorite line is ‘I’m afraid of myself,’ which I think is the core of the film.”
Telluride Film Festival
There is an unusual interplay between the festivals at Venice, Telluride and Toronto. They are somehow competitive and symbiotic, sharing some titles and not others and leaving it to journalists and audiences to sort out what, if anything, it means when certain titles play some festivals but not others. Taking place in a small Colorado mountain town, the long-running Telluride Film Festival has recently seen its profile surge in no small part thanks to a new-found perception as an early awards-season indicator.
Rebecca Keegan offers an overview of what is playing at Telluride, including Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land,” Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival,” Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea” and Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” all films that one can expect to be hearing about quite a bit in the months ahead.
Steve Zeitchik took a closer look at “Una,” an adaptation of the stage play “Blackbird,” which promises to be one of the most explosive films of the season. Rooney Mara plays a woman confronting the man, played by Ben Mendelsohn, who sexually abused her as a young girl.
‘The Light Between Oceans’
“The Light Between Oceans” is a romantic period melodrama directed by Derek Cianfrance, best known for the Ryan Gosling-Michelle Williams romance “Blue Valentine,” and the filmmaker again proves himself adept at showing extremely good-looking people suffer the anguish of love and heartbreak. Michael Fassbender plays a World War I veteran turned lighthouse keeper who marries a local woman played by Alicia Vikander. Their provisional family bliss is later turned upside down by the appearance of a mysterious woman, played by Rachel Weisz. (Can a movie have a cast that is simply too good looking?)
In his review for The Times, Justin Chang said, “No movie lover, of course, can rightly claim to hate manipulation; even the purest, most spontaneous emotions are the product of a filmmaker’s successful calculation, and ‘The Light Between Oceans,’ rooted somewhere between the grand tradition of classic melodrama and the seaside tearjerkers of Nicholas Sparks, need not apologize for lingering on Vikander’s flurries of maternal anguish, Weisz’s dignified sniffles and Fassbender’s bravely choked-back sobs.”
In the L.A. Weekly, April Wolfe wrote, “Cianfrance may be the best actors’ director working in the business today,” while adding that “the sense of authenticity that marks ‘The Light Between Oceans’ at its best has everything to do with the acting.”
In the Chicago Tribune, Katie Walsh said, “Cianfrance makes a film that is both epic and intimate, a love story intertwined with tragedy.” She added, “It ends up more of a study in moral and ethical decision-making than as an emotional catharsis or release, but it’s a worthy journey nonetheless.”
‘Complete Unknown’
In the new film “Complete Unknown,” Rachel Weisz — this week’s MVP — plays a woman who creates and then sheds not just a new hairstyle or look but an entirely new identity for herself every few years. When she contrives to run into an ex (Michael Shannon) who knew her as her original self, there is a push-pull dynamic to whether she will return to a normal life or whether he will join her wild adventure.
In his review for The Times, Kenneth Turan called Weisz “one of the most effective actresses working today” while lauding “her intoxicating movie-star performance.” He added, “While there’s a certain amount of contrivance in this situation, Weisz’s acting enables you to forget all about it.”
Writing for RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny noted, “The movie does pretty well as a treatment of identity and selfhood in a social landscape that grows increasingly alienating as it becomes more transparent.”
In the Village Voice, Abbey Bender said of Weisz, “While she is a compelling performer, the film is ultimately a Hitchcock-inspired thriller without too many real thrills.”
And I recently spoke to Weisz about her role in “Complete Unknown,” as well as the upcoming “Denial” and her return to the New York stage in a revival of “Proof.” Of “Complete Unknown” she said, “She doesn’t question what she’s doing, nor does the film. It’s very weird. I kept saying to Josh, ‘Why does she do what she does?’ And he wasn’t really interested in answering that question.”
Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.
Movie Trailers
Only good movies
Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
