Fall Sneaks: Independent films to watch for

There are so many good films releasing in the fall, it’s easy to get caught up in the splashy ones — the ones with the A-list actors and the biggest marketing campaigns. But there are plenty of smaller gems coming to theaters in the next couple of months as well. Here’s a look at a few of those worth taking the trouble to find amid the power players.

Liberal Arts

Unlike many young actresses, Elizabeth Olsen opted to postpone her career to attend college, spending her undergraduate years at New York University. But when she turned up to shoot “Liberal Arts” at Kenyon College in the remote Amish country of Ohio, her experience there was far different than the one she had on NYU’s busy Manhattan campus. “Kenyon is euphoric in nature,” says Olsen, 23. Her character in the film, the idealistic Zibby, falls for an alumnus played by Josh Radnor, the “How I Met Your Mother” star who wrote and directed the film and attended Kenyon himself. “I was drawn to Zibby because she feels so much older than she actually is, and I can relate to that,” Olsen adds. “When I was a teenager, all I wanted was to go to college.”

Opens: Sept. 14

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky knows what it’s like to be an angsty teenager — after all, he says it was his torturous high school years that prompted him to write his bestselling 1999 book “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” as “a pretty messed up 26-year-old.” But when it came time to direct a film adaptation of his novel, Chbosky found that his leading actors — including “Harry Potter” veteran Emma Watson and Logan Lerman — were unfamiliar with the high school experience. “Emma grew up in London, so filming in a suburb was as exotic as Paris would be to you or me,” the filmmaker recalls. “I told her to just go to the food court at the mall and watch people. She loved getting to have a typical young American experience.” In her first more adult role, Watson plays an outgoing, sometimes promiscuous teenager who helps Lerman’s outcast character — the one based on Chbosky — fit in at school after a stay at a psychiatric ward.

PHOTOS: 2012 Fall movies sneaks

Opens: Sept. 21

End of Watch

Writer-director David Ayer is no stranger to police stories, having worked on “Training Day,” “The Fast and the Furious,” “Street Kings” and “Dark Blue.” But while those films focus on officers who blur — or in some cases, obliterate — the line between cop and criminal, “That vein of ore has been thoroughly mined,” Ayer says. His latest film, “End of Watch,” is a gritty, documentary-style drama about the bond shared by two dedicated young LAPD officers, played with easy chemistry by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña. “I really wanted to just nail the genre and then walk away,” Ayer says, “and go do musicals or something.”

Opens: Sept. 21

The Oranges

Ever since she began playing the uppity, spoiled princess Blair Waldorf on “Gossip Girl” five years ago, Leighton Meester has been sent a very specific type of screenplay. “They always star college-aged girls who are rich or bitchy — and whenever I see anything like that whatsoever, I like to just close the script,” she says. That was why she made it through a draft of “The Oranges,” a dramedy about two tight-knit families who live across the street from one another in suburban New Jersey. The two clans stop spending holidays together when Meester’s character, Nina — a free-spirited, flirtatious twentysomething — has an affair with David (Hugh Laurie), a man who is her father’s age, and also her father’s best friend. “That age gap would probably be too much for me,” says the actress. “But for the movie, I put my judgments aside and saw that sometimes you can have a connection with someone that just goes beyond age.”

Opens: Oct. 5

amy.kaufman@latimes.com