Newsletter: Indie Focus: Invention and creation in ‘Don’t Think Twice,’ ‘Indignation’ and ‘Tallulah’

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

This week was so jammed with new releases that we’re skipping our typical older rep-house selection to spotlight four new films. And even then, just this week in local theaters there’s the action blockbuster “Jason Bourne,” the decidedly smaller “The Land,” “Into the Forest” with Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood, Anna Gunn in “Equity,” the docs “Don’t Blink — Robert Frank,” “Gleason” and “The Seventh Fire” and plenty more.

Also, I reviewed “Bad Moms,” which features performers I like very much in a movie that I wish did better by them.

And the Coen Brothers’ debut, “Blood Simple,” is playing in L.A. in a new remastered version. It holds up.

So go ahead and tell me again how there’s nothing in movie theaters.

We also have another screening and Q&A event coming up soon with “The Intervention.” Check events.latimes.com for more info.

‘Don’t Think Twice’

Mike Birbiglia writes and directs “Don’t Think Twice,” an earnest and insightful film about an improv comedy troupe. The film touches on ambition and failure and is dramatic, funny, warm and really one of the year’s delights so far. Birbiglia costars as a member of the troupe alongside Gillian Jacobs, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate Micucci, Chris Gethard and Tami Sagher. As with his previous movie, “Sleepwalk With Me,” the film features NPR’s Ira Glass as a producer.

In his review for The Times, Gary Goldstein noted, “For a movie that involves creating laughs on the fly, the story is tightly told and acted, which adds to its buoyant pacing, astute observations and well-judged poignancy.”

Mike Birbiglia (in blue checkered shirt) with actors Gillian Jacobs, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate Micucci and Chris Gethard.

(Jennifer S. Altman / For the Los Angeles Times )

At the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips declared it “an unusually delicate movie about the brutal business of being funny for a living.”

At BuzzFeed, Alison Willmore compared the film to others that drew from the personal experience of its creators, noting, “It’s tender and believable while maintaining enough distance on its material to give it form, telling a story rather than a series of anecdotes.”

Times colleague Steve Zeitchik wrote about the film after its SXSW premiere earlier this year. I also spoke to Birbiglia, Glass and some of the cast for a recent story.

And I sat down for an extended conversation with Ira Glass at SXSW.

‘Indignation’

James Schamus has had a long and illustrious career in film, as a producer and screenwriter and former head of Focus Features. But he makes his feature directing debut with “Indignation,” which he adapted from the 2008 novel by Philip Roth. In the film, set in 1951, a young man (Logan Lerman) goes to college in a small town in Ohio and finds his stern assumptions about the world challenged by both a sophisticated, troubled girl (Sarah Gadon) and a strict but genuine administrator (Tracy Letts).

Reviewing for The Times, Kenneth Turan called the film “an impressive directing debut,” adding that it “tells a very particular story, one that’s bittersweet, heartbreaking and bleakly comic all at once, and it gets it right.”

At New York magazine’s Vulture site, David Edelstein noted that “Schamus’s style is deliberate but not cold, and the performances he has elicited are passionately deliberate.” He also added, “Is there a better Roth adaptation? It’s not close.”

“James Schamus directing a Philip Roth adaptation? Sign me up,” is what Letts said to me for a story I wrote on Schamus and the film. Viewers would also be advised to follow his decision.

‘Tallulah’

In her feature debut, “Tallulah,” filmmaker Sian Heder, also a writer for “Orange Is the New Black,” creates a dramatic comedy about a young woman (Ellen Page) who impulsively takes an infant she was babysitting when she decides the mother (Tammy Blanchard) is unfit. With nowhere else to go, she takes the child to her boyfriend’s mother (Allison Janney). The film becomes a delicately sincere treatise on motherhood.

Reviewing for The Times, Katie Walsh said that “it’s unlikely you’ll see a film more refreshingly honest and incisive about motherhood than ‘Tallulah.’ ”

At MTV, Inkoo Kang called the film “a disturbing yet compassionate tale of being forced into a decision in a situation where there are no good choices.”

In the New York Times, Neil Genzlinger wrote that it’s “a deft mix of emotions: heart-rending, occasionally funny, even harrowing, as the police get involved. And if there were an Oscar for best performance by children too young to know they’re in a movie, the twins playing this baby (Liliana and Evangeline Ellis) would be a shoo-in.”

Back just before the film premiered at Sundance, I spoke to Heder about the unmistakable irony of her having been pregnant with her second child while shooting the movie, meaning she was going through some of the same issues as her characters to get the film made.

“There is so much pressure on women to be nailing it all of the time,” Heder said. “The irony is my experience of having to leave my child to make the movie made me feel like I was failing in some way like the mothers in the movie are failing.”

‘The Childhood of a Leader’

It became something of a running joke among the festival crowd just how often the young actor Brady Corbet would pop up in small cameo roles in films like “Saint Laurent” or “Clouds of Sils Maria” alongside his larger roles for Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke. His European excursion seems to have now paid off in his debut as a filmmaker with the fascinating “The Childhood of a Leader,” something of a fictionalized fantasy origin story of a Mitteleuropean dictator starring Robert Pattinson, Stacy Martin, Bérénice Bejo, Liam Cunningham and Tom Sweet. The movie picked up two prizes when it premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

Reviewing for The Times, Gary Goldstein called the film “intriguing and haunting” while also singling out the rare score by the elusive musician Scott Walker.

Calling the movie a “slow-boil freakout” in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis noted it as “a persuasive portrait of a monster-to-be.”

At IndieWire, David Ehrlich called the film an “unusually accomplished directorial debut” while adding that for Corbet it’s “a strange and startling film that reflects the unique trajectory of his career, as well as the influence of the iconoclastic directors with whom he’s already worked.”

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