Newsletter: Indie Focus: ‘Right Now, Wrong Then,’ ‘Central Intelligence’ and ‘The Witness’ will surprise you

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

As we get deeper into the summer movie season, I hear more and more people saying they don’t feel there are any movies out there for them. There are a number of movies that have been hanging on in theaters, including “The Lobster,” “Maggie’s Plan,” “Love and Friendship” and “De Palma,” “Weiner” and “The Wailing,” that deserve to be seen if you haven’t caught up to them yet.

I’m very excited that we’ll have a screening of the upcoming movie “Captain Fantastic” on June 29 followed by a Q&A with writer-director Matt Ross. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival and has since picked up awards at festivals in Cannes and Seattle.

Check events.latimes.com for more info.

Nonstop movies. Movies nonstop.

‘Right Now, Wrong Then’

Hong Sang-soo is the kind of filmmaker who may be far more familiar to many people as a name and a vague idea than as someone who makes movies you actually see. The South Korean director has been an extremely prolific and enduring recent presence on the recent international festival circuit, partly blurring the effect from one film to the next.

His latest film, “Right Now, Wrong Then,” winner of the top prize at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, is getting a one-off Los Angeles screening on June 25 thanks to the Cinefamily, Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. The movie is about a filmmaker whiling away time before a lecture and meeting a young woman.

Writing about the film for the Telegraph, Robbie Collin said, “It’s a film that deserves to grow Hong’s overseas following. No director working today can carry out this kind of heavyweight emotional excavation with such feather-light flicks of his trowel. That’s Hong’s gift, as counterintuitive as it is unique: he makes molehills out of mountains.”

Indiewire critic Eric Kohn said, “At its best, however, ‘Right Now, Wrong Then’ is a film of minute observations rather than grand revelations, less concerned with butterfly-effect consequentiality than the variable human foibles that can turn a bad day into a good one.”

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Colin Marshall wrote a fine overview of “Right Now” within the broader scope of Hong’s career, noting, “This has increasingly drawn accusations that Hong “makes the same movie over and over again,” a charge I can accept, but only to the extent that, say, Mark Rothko painted the same pictures over and over again.”

‘Central Intelligence’

Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart are two of the most purely likable personalities on-screen today, so the idea of putting them together in an action comedy seems a natural fit. Have I personally seen the movie? No. Do I have any idea what it’s about? Not really. Do I care? Not particularly. Make that “One for ‘Central Intelligence,’ please.”

In his review for The Times, Justin Chang gives reason to trust those instincts when he writes, “‘Central Intelligence’ is dumb in all the right ways, and also a bit smarter than you might expect. It jams together two frequently incompatible Hollywood modes — the comedy and the action movie — and somehow doesn’t wind up feeling like an oil-and-water exercise: It’s more like oil and paint thinner. It’s a ’90s nostalgia trip, a rambunctious spy thriller and a knucklehead bromance rolled into one, and as disjointed as that sounds, the movie locates in all three stories a single, unifying thread of male insecurity.”

At RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz added, “It may not be a deep and complex masterpiece that will spawn symposiums and appreciations, but it is a classic of a very particular sort. It’s the kind of movie that you watch on TV when you’re supposed to be doing more important things, or experiencing more important movies, even though you’ve already seen it ten times, because it’s still funny, and because you believe in the big man and the small man that he looks up to.”

For the Associated Press, Lindsey Bahr said, “Again, it’s the actors who really bring ‘Central Intelligence’ home. One of Johnson’s great onscreen strengths is that he has a believable softness to him that belies his hard shell, even in his more hardcore roles. Here, that high-wattage charisma is turned up to 11. He’s almost daring you not to smile along with him.”

‘The Witness’

The story of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese has become the stuff of urban legend. (It was even featured in a recent episode of the TV show “Girls.”) The new documentary “The Witness,” directed by James D. Solomon, attempts to untangle much of what we think we know about her death, while also bestowing further attention and meaning as well to her life.

In his review for The Times, Justin Chang notes how the real witness of the title is Genovese’s younger brother Bill Genovese and how “The strength of ‘The Witness’ lies in its recognition that the truth is often not just elusive but unattainable. To call the film a debunking or a corrective would ascribe to it a level of knowledge that neither Bill Genovese nor director James Solomon, a screenwriter making a fine nonfiction filmmaking debut, claims to possess.”

At the Daily Beast, Jen Yamato wrote, “Tracking his amateur investigation over the course of several years, five decades after the media turned his sister into a proto-meme, the documentary ‘The Witness’ takes a heartaching deep dive into a story we already thought we knew.”

‘Character Witness: The Films of Ted Kotcheff’

The American Cinematheque is going to put on a series of films directed by Canadian-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff. He has the sort of wayward, journeyman career that leads one to stare at his filmography and think, “He directed that?” followed by a few entries later wondering, “That too?”

Who would think the same man could make the ’70s bourgeois satire “Fun With Dick and Jane” starring George Segal and Jane Fonda and the ’80s corpse comedy “Weekend at Bernie’s.” And then also make the recently revived, terrifying outback freakout film “Wake in Fright” and the comedy-drama of Jewish identity “The Apprenticeship of Dudley Kravitz,” which would be nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe. And to top it all off he directed the tough, smart, sensitive action of “First Blood,” the movie that introduced the character of John Rambo to the world.

On the Cinematheque’s own blog is an interview with Kotcheff done by former Times staffer Susan King. Kotcheff is scheduled to attend all three nights of the series.

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