Newsletter: Indie Focus: Family and future with ‘Captain Fantastic,’ ‘Zero Days’ and a Kirk Douglas tribute

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

Since the writing of our last newsletter came the unexpected news of the deaths of the great filmmakers Michael Cimino and Abbas Kiarostami. One would be unlikely to place the two together were it not for this bit of timing, as they were two very different people who made very different films. And yet they both made movies that were formally daring and thematically rich and each carried a real personal mystique. They were film directors in the greatest, grandest, most exciting ways the term evokes.

Whether you are revisiting their work or encountering it for the first time, both Kiarostami and Cimino are deeply rewarding filmmakers well worth exploring. And they both have many of their titles easily available either online or on disc.

We’ve got some more screening/Q&A events coming up soon. Check events.latimes.com for more info.

Nonstop movies. Movies nonstop.

“Captain Fantastic” star Viggo Mortensen is photographed at the Cinema Bar in Culver City.

(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times )

‘Captain Fantastic’

Matt Ross, writer-director of “Captain Fantastic,” is a familiar face from his long career as an actor, most recently on the television show “Silicon Valley.” In his new movie, Viggo Mortensen plays a father of six who is raising his brood off the grid in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. When circumstances set them on a road trip to New Mexico, the entire family finds their unconventional way of life challenged.

In his review for The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “By the end, Ross’ initially disarming fusion of cleverness and whimsy has curdled into a dispiritingly familiar mix of sentimentality and self-satisfaction … I don’t mean to make ‘Captain Fantastic’ sound terrible; it doesn’t risk enough to earn that designation.”

In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis said, “It’s left to Mr. Mortensen, who can make menace feel like vulnerability — and turn vulnerability into a confession — to keep the movie from slipping into sentimentality. He’s the most obvious reason to see it, although Mr. Ross’s insistence on taking your intelligence for granted is itself a great turn on.”

Writing for the Associated Press, Lindsey Bahr called the film “no flash in the pan success. It’s a single, beautifully realized vision with edge and a true heart.”

Josh Rottenberg recently spoke to Mortensen about the movie. The actor said of his character, “Even though some of the things he does are extreme and some of his methods I wouldn’t use, I did find something I really admired about him.”

‘Nuts!’

Documentarian Penny Lane previously made the sensitive and emotional “Our Nixon,” drawn from home movie footage of President Richard Nixon. Her new film, “Nuts!,” tells the story of John Brinkley, who achieved renown in the 1920s and ‘30s for a purported cure for impotence.

In his review for The Times, Robert Abele calls the film an “entertaining hornswoggle of a movie.” He added, “You may think falling for goat glands is a pre-Internet age, snake-oil era folly. But call it something else, and who knows what you’ll believe if the spiel is powerful enough?”

At the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday added, “Lane’s cheeky invocation of postmodern indeterminacy and the film’s overall tone of winking ridicule begin to feel glib and slightly superficial. ‘Nuts!’ is an intriguing, if patronizing, curio from the cabinet of American arcana, a geegaw from the collective attic that, when dusted off, looks grotesquely funny in the light of today. We wonder how anyone could buy it. Just imagine what, one day, they’ll say about us.”

Writing about the film when it premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Jordan Hoffman for the Guardian noted the film as a story pulled from the pages of the mythologized “old, weird America” and that it “has all the whimsy of a tall tale, until a late change in tone surprises with genuine emotion. ‘Nuts!’ is really a kick.”

‘Zero Days’

The Oscar-winning, blazingly prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has created a new film on cyber-security that continues to investigate questions some viewers may still have from his own “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” or even Laura Poitras’ “Citizen Four.” (Fans of Michael Mann’s recent cyber-security thriller “Blackhat” should also take note.) Gibney’s new “Zero Days” examines the computer worm most commonly known as “Stuxnet.”

In his review for The Times, Justin Chang writes “Gibney’s film cuts across subjects and genres with its own fluid, quicksilver intelligence. It is by turns a coolly riveting geopolitical thriller, a potted history of Iran’s nuclear program, an alphabet soup of government acronyms, a detailed primer on exactly how malware operates, and a fascinating experiment in cinematic form that may test the limits of some viewers’ tolerance for lines of impenetrable code flooding a movie screen.”

Writing for the New York Times, Stephen Holden said, “To make a documentary on such a complicated, far-reaching subject and maintain a common-sense perspective requires formidable organizational skills and a steady narrative hand to keep the movie from straying into any number of theoretical byways. It takes the imagination of a science-fiction writer to make it coherent and entertaining enough to hold your attention.

The Times’ Steven Zeitchik talked to Gibney about the film. “I wanted to make a movie about the future,” Gibney said. He invoked words he heard from a war correspondent while making his Oscar-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side” when he added, “‘Go not to where the attack was, but where the next attack is going to be.’”

Kirk Douglas tribute

Kirk Douglas will turn 100 in December, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive has gotten a head start on the celebrations by launching the program “Kirk Douglas: A Centennial Celebration.” Already underway, the series runs to Sept 30.

Times critic Kenneth Turan recently called Douglas “one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars,” and this series will definitely prove why, with screenings of such films as “Lust for Life,” “Ace in the Hole,” “The Big Sky,” “Spartacus,” “Lonely Are the Brave,” “Paths of Glory,” “Out of the Past,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Two Weeks in Another Town.” And that’s only a partial list!

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