Karina Longworth

"I'd heard that Rikk Agnew, the guitarist from the Adolescents, was, like, going to be playing the driveway at this house party in Chino. It was Friday night, and I didn't have anything to do, so I just went up there. And I was like, 'Oh, my God, I've walked......

"I hate it when people talk about 'Greek films,' like they're all the same," Athina Rachel Tsangari told me in September, over drinks at the Toronto Film Festival. It's a fair complaint: Shared national heritage is the least interesting thing uniting the two movies at AFI Fest bearing the name......

When Kirsten Dunst was awarded the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her turn as a manic-depressive ad woman/bride in Lars Von Trier's gorgeous apocalypse parable Melancholia, much of the international press corps sniffed that it was a consolation prize. Had it not been for Von Trier's......

Eyes rolled in some cinephile circles when AFI announced that its festival program would include a three-film section called "Spotlight on Joe Swanberg." But then, eyes roll in some circles at the mere mention of the 30-year-old, Chicago-based filmmaker whose zero-budget video-films, mostly about the sexual mores of white city-dwellers,......

Billed as "an effort by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb," this 75-minute video diary documents a day in the life of Iranian filmmaker Panahi (Offside), who is under house arrest in Tehran and has been banned from filmmaking. Mirtahmasb films Panahi's daily activities, both the mundane and the borderline seditious......

"Every hipster is a potential criminal," warns a student communist in Valery Todorovsky's musical period piece Hipsters. These "hipsters" are, in style and substance, the polar opposite of today's artfully disheveled gentrifiers: In a postwar Moscow where consuming Western products is considered a form of treason, their insouciant fetishization —......