Newsletter: Indie Focus: Exploring worlds with ‘Café Society,’ ‘Ghostbusters’ and Maurice Pialat

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

A number of the movies we’ve been talking about from earlier in the year have now made their way onto home video. While many now use streaming/download services, we still support actual discs for bonus features (although props to iTunes for now including bonus material with many of their downloads).

Angelina-Jolie Pitt’s “By the Sea,” Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room” and Jia Zhangke’s “Mountains May Depart” have all come out recently and include revealing material on the process of their making. (“By the Sea,” in particular, has a short featurette with Angelina Jolie-Pitt and Brad Pitt hanging out with Gena Rowlands at her house that is absolutely adorable.) They are all movies worth either catching up with for the first time or revisiting.

And we have a screening of the new movie “Indignation” coming up on July 21, followed by a Q&A with the director and screenwriter James Schamus. Check events.latimes.com for more info.

Nonstop movies. Movies nonstop.

‘Caf Society’

We in these parts are of that subset who still watch Woody Allen movies, although sometimes it is with happy anticipation and sometimes a sense of ill-at-ease foreboding. His new film, “Caf Society,” has already generated a fair amount of press apart from its 1930s Hollywood setting and onscreen romantic triangle between Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Steve Carell.

In his review for The Times, Kenneth Turan said the film is “of course funny, but it also ends up, almost without our realizing it, trafficking in memory, regret and the fate of relationships in a world of romantic melancholy.”

Over at MTV News, Amy Nicholson mostly focused on Stewart’s performance but added, “‘Caf Society’ is a light-fingered, backstabbing trifle … So what if people can’t commit to their spouses? So what if an old, rich man claims his right to woo a young girl? Life is for living, and we all have failings to forgive.”

In a bruising review for the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “It’s hard to say if Mr. Allen is testing the audience’s tolerance or trolling our sensitivities, or for that matter if he’s just blithely carrying on as he always has, oblivious to changing mores or the vicissitudes of his own reputation … It doesn’t really matter because ‘Caf Society’ ultimately poses no interesting questions about its maker or its characters. The movie most closely resembles the kind of Hollywood product for which its deepest nostalgia is reserved. It’s a pop-culture throwaway, a charming bit of trivia, the punch line to a half-forgotten joke.”

At the Boston Globe, Ty Burr wrote an essay on why he feels Allen has always been overrated.

I myself have written something that will be publishing soon about the complicated relationship between Woody Allen the artist, Woody Allen the public persona and his audience.

‘Ghostbusters’

With a budget reported at more than $140 million, the new “Ghostbusters” isn’t the kind of film one might think to be covered by a newsletter with the word “indie” in its title. (But we like to keep y’all guessing.) Filmmaker Paul Feig has been on a real roll with his recent films, including “Bridesmaids” and “Spy,” so we are excited to see him work on a mega-budget studio action-comedy starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon. Sounds like just the kind of movie you want in the summer.

Grappling with the pre-release dust-up over the lead characters this time out being women, in his review for The Times, Justin Chang wrote that the new film “doesn’t bring a new approach to the material beyond its subversive central conceit; worse, it doesn’t seem to realize that it should have bothered to try. As with so many recent acts of cultural nostalgia masquerading as up-to-the-minute entertainment (‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ being the supreme example), the desire to please a franchise’s long-standing fan base — and to placate some of its more outraged constituents — seems to have canceled out the possibility of a fresh rethink.”

Manohla Dargis’ review of the film for the New York Times immediately seems like one of the most crucial pieces of film criticism this year, for the way in which she positions it within the discussion of gender on screen but also on its own terms. As she wrote, “No one performance dominates the new ‘Ghostbusters,’ which is for the most part democratically comic (a Paul Feig signature), although Kate McKinnon’s magnificent, eccentric turn comes close … Ms. McKinnon makes for a sublime nerd goddess (she brings a dash of the young Jerry Lewis to the role with a glint of Amy Poehler) and, in an earlier age, would probably have been sidelined as a sexy, ditsy secretary. Here, she embodies the new ‘Ghostbusters’ at its best: Girls rule, women are funny, get over it.”

At BuzzFeed, Alison Willmore added of the ensemble, “Jones, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Wiig are so good together — and in ways that are distinctively theirs and not recycled from the past — that their message of not giving a damn resonates better than the movie’s underwhelming climax … The interesting part is in how these characters bounce off of one another along the way, these brilliant, awkward, hilarious women who come to find they need affirmation only from one another.”

The Times’ Rebecca Keegan interviewed Jones and McKinnon and found that the film’s theme of self-acceptance was part of their off-screen selves as well.

“I know who I am,” Jones said in a recent joint interview with McKinnon. “And I don’t care if you think I’m sexy.”

“I tried for a short time to be something I wasn’t and had no success with it,” McKinnon said. “It’s a practical solution to just be yourself.”

‘Men Go To Battle’

Directed by Zachary Treitz from a screenplay written by Treitz and Kate Lyn Sheil (one of the best actresses on the indie circuit today and who has a small role here), “Men Go to Battle” is a film that is both an ambitious period piece and a small, intimate story of two brothers just trying to get by.

In his review for The Times, Robert Abele called the film “a Civil War story in indie miniature, a tale of struggling sibling Kentucky farmers whose bond fractures over the course of a year as the conflict encroaches. This isn’t high-toned period melodrama about the sweep of history and mythological wartime pluck. It’s a smudgy, handheld trek into corners of hickdom and survival that feels contemporary … and yet also unfolds like an unearthed diary entry from a hardscrabble past.”

At Filmmaker, Sarah Salovaara interviewed Treitz and Sheil. Treitz told her, “We wanted to create the sense that the story could go anywhere, that nothing in the characters’ lives is predetermined. We didn’t want this feeling to be limited by our budget, which meant seeing a lot of different locations and environments.”

Maurice Pialat retrospective

Maurice Pialat is one of those filmmakers who is likely talked about more than his films are actually seen. Or, as critic Kent Jones once put it, “Why is Maurice Pialat considered a giant in France and just another French director here?”

The UCLA Film and Television Archive will be the L.A. stop for the traveling series “Love Exists: A Maurice Pialat retrospective,” showing eight of Pialat’s feature films and a 2007 documentary produced by his widow. When Pialat, who died in 2003, won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for “Under the Sun of Satan” in 1987 to some uproar, he notoriously responded, “I don’t like you either.”

Among the other films screening in the program are 1980’s “Loulou,” starring Grard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert, 1991’s “Van Gogh,” starring musician Jacques Dutronc as the famed painter, and 1972’s bracing marital drama “We Won’t Grow Old Together.”

Writing about this same retrospective when it played in NYC last fall, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody called Pialat “one of the greatest, most influential, and most misunderstood modern directors,” adding “his influence is intensely powerful — so powerful that it overwhelms and submerges all but the strongest filmmakers who endure it. Pialat’s admirers are legion; his followers are an intrepid few.”

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