Indie Focus: Fractured families in ‘The Invitation,’ ‘Louder Than Bombs’ and ‘Demolition’

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

This week I reviewed the latest vehicle for the comedy dynamo that is Melissa McCarthy, “The Boss.” Directed by Ben Falcone, with the script credited to McCarthy, Falcone and Steve Mallory, the film is about a financial self-help guru who loses her fortune.

Alas, I found the movie a disappointment. As I wrote, “It is hard to think of a movie squandering the opportunity of a perfectly timed cultural moment quite like ‘The Boss’ … Just imagine the filmmakers’ good fortune in tapping into issues that appeal to people on both sides of the current political divide. In the right hands, ‘The Boss’ could skewer the brash ambition and entitled certitude of a Donald Trump type and the desire to see all that dismantled and discarded by Bernie Sanders-style supporters. But these are not the right hands.”

We’ve got some pretty exciting screenings and Q&As coming together on the big board back at Indie Focus HQ. Check back at events.latimes.com for more info.

Nonstop movies. Movies nonstop.

‘The Invitation’

A mix of pitch-black L.A. satire and disturbing horror freak-out, “The Invitation” is also the first feature film from director Karyn Kusama in a number of years.

“The less you know about Karyn Kusama’s excellent psychological thriller ‘The Invitation’ the better,” wrote Katie Walsh in her review for The Times. She lauds Kusama for “parceling out just enough information to understand its logic, while leaving certain dim recesses mysterious.”

In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis said, “Dinner parties in movies tend to be overdetermined affairs, ideal settings for wit, wisdom and the breakdown of civilization … Still, there’s something off about the hostess, who’s slinking around barefoot wearing a vacant smile and a long white dress. It’s the kind of number that Joan Didion might once have slipped on for another beautiful-people night of anomie and booze.”

At MTV, Amy Nicholson notes, “With the wickedly sharp ‘The Invitation,’ Kusama has demanded that Hollywood give her a seat at the table. I’d give her one — or else.”

At BuzzFeed, Alison Willmore said, “its buildup is particularly good, melding Los Angeles hippie-dippieism with therapy-readied sensitivity in a group of characters who think of themselves as too sophisticated and too accepting to blink at growing weirdness.”

Jim Hemphill had a fine Q&A with Kusama on the strategies behind the movie in Filmmaker magazine.

I spoke to Kusama along with screenwriters/producers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi for a story that will be running soon. As the film slowly ratchets up the tension, a dinner party goes awry, viewers are drawn further and further in.

“I had to be thinking what the calibration was all the time,” said Kusama. “A single look has meaning in the film, particularly if you’re watching it for a second or third time. In another film it might be sort of a throwaway and there are no throwaway moments in this film.”

‘Louder Than Bombs’

It’s no secret that Joachim Trier is among our favorite contemporary filmmakers. His latest film, “Louder Than Bombs,” is his English-language feature debut, a story of a family dealing with grief starring Jesse Eisenberg, Gabriel Byrne, Amy Ryan and Isabelle Huppert.

In her review in The Times, Sheri Linden said, “beneath the well-worn dysfunctional-family setup are bracing observations of the human coping mechanism … With its unforced incidents and subtle performances, Trier’s film makes potently clear that emotional truth is a matter of perspective.”

In the New York Times, A.O. Scott said the film “is disarmingly quiet, not unlike the Smiths album that shares its title. Buried or deflected emotion — conveyed through mordant remarks, pregnant glances, long stretches of silence — can generate more impact than explosive drama … Mr. Trier’s direction is as restrained and tense as the behavior of his characters, who suffer without making too much noise about it until they seem ready to explode.”

Bilge Ebiri at the Village Voice wrote, “in finding a narrative and visual style that embodies that obsessiveness, that lost-ness, Trier puts us inside his characters’ heads. What’s more, he does so without it ever feeling forced, or like some kind of authorial dictum. For all the film’s seemingly unusual narrative choices, you emerge from it thinking this story couldn’t properly be told any other way.”

I’ll be publishing a story on Trier and the film soon. As he was introducing the movie at its recent Los Angeles premiere, Trier implied how telling a story in America wasn’t so different from his movies made in Norway. “I’m from Norway,” he said, “the suburbs of Europe.”

‘Demolition’

Director Jean-Marc Vallée has brought out acclaimed performances from actresses such as Emily Blunt and Reese Witherspoon and actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto. With his new “Demolition,” he turns his attention to actor Jake Gyllenhaal and a tale of a man dealing with the shock of his wife’s sudden death.

As The Times’ own Kenneth Turan put it, “‘Demolition’ is a well-meaning misfire, terribly earnest but unconvincing for all of that. A film more pleased with itself than it has reason to be, it does provide a chance to watch the always-involving Jake Gyllenhaal at work.”

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center.”

In one of the movie’s most positive reviews, Alonso Duralde at the Wrap added, “‘Demolition’ strikes a tricky balance; it’s a comedy of manners that never judges its hero’s bizarre behavior. Had it stuck to its emotional guns, it would stand much taller, but even its ultimate flaws can’t erode its sturdy foundation.”

Steve Zeitchik visited the set during the making of the film. Gyllenhaal said of working with Vallée, “There’s an interesting balance between absolute freedom and absolute control [when] making a movie with Jean-Marc. And what’s amazing is to watch him dance back and forth between the two.”

‘The Girlfriend Experience’

We are partisans of cinema in these parts, no doubt about it. But in today’s media age, that also means digging television. The new series “The Girlfriend Experience” features any number of people we like from movies. It’s a veritable shopping list of our favorite talent, with Steven Soderbergh, Amy Seimetz, Lodge Kerrigan, Riley Keough, Kate Lyn Sheil and Shane Carruth. We’re so excited, we’re figuring out how to get the Starz channel.

The series is loosely based on Soderbergh’s 2009 movie, which starred Sasha Grey, about a young woman who works as an escort providing not just sex but also companionship and comfort like an actual relationship for a top-dollar price.

In reviewing the show, The Times’ Mary McNamara said, “‘The Girlfriend Experience’ so longs to be arty, with its walls of glass and indirect lighting, that watching it is a bit like flipping through a stack of style and shelter magazines at the doctor’s office … Before you know it, 30 minutes have passed in which nothing much has happened, beyond the reinforcement of 1 million infuriating stereotypes and the thought of how great it would be if the narrative turned to Christine using her legal abilities to improve the lives of prostitutes, high-end and otherwise.”

The Times’ Libby Hill will be publishing a feature piece of her own soon. As Seimetz said to her, “The first season is about a woman that’s figuring out her boundaries as she goes. She’s not seasoned, she’s not always making the best decisions, but she’s at least handling herself.”

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