Karina Longworth

When Albert Brooks greets me in the reception area of his Beverly Hills office, I immediately recognize his shirt. The baggy, faded red, short-sleeve button-down imprinted with dull green palm trees belongs to the inimitably tacky wardrobe of Bernie Rose, the mobster and sometime B-movie producer Brooks plays in Nicolas......

Thurs., Sept. 8 Tonight's the final night to catch Littlerock, Mike Ott's award-winning fresh take on the California road-trip indie, at the Sunset 5. Sat., Sept. 10 This month's installment of Film Journeys at the Echo Park Film Center features Philippe Grandrieux's Un Lac (The Lake), a dark (often literally......

Currently the fifth-to-last film on Steven Soderbergh's ever-expanding pre-retirement slate, Contagion opens on Day 2 of a global viral epidemic. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Beth Emhoff, an American employee for an ominously unspecific multinational corporation, who returns from a business trip in Hong Kong to her wintry Midwestern home feeling like......

The Toronto Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, offering the usual mix of Oscar bait, new films from foreign and experimental masters, and basically every conceivable thing in between. With the caveat that the lineup, hundreds of films strong, could not possibly be tackled in full by one lone lady critic,......

After opening in second place behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes on its debut weekend, The Help topped the box office the following week, toppling newcomers such as Conan the Barbarian and the fourth Spy Kids flick, and declining only 23 percent while expanding its number of screens......

The sleeper hit of the 2010 film festival and indie awards circuit, Mike Ott's moody, microbudget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-age Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film's co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto). En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their......

In Jesse Peretz's Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd plays Ned, a kind of Upstate New York version of "The Dude" Lebowski — a man out of time, blinkered enough to be living the hippie dream. In the film's first scene, Ned is "entrapped" into selling pot at a farmers market......

When we put Kevin Smith on our cover in April, the Clerks writer-director was telling the world that he planned to self-distribute his new film, Red State. At the time Smith was in the midst of a tour, charging fans about $70 to see the film, followed by one of......

One Day stars Anne Hathaway as Emma, a too-serious would-be writer in coke-bottle glasses and combat boots. She's nursing a crush on Dexter (Jim Sturgess), her too-good-looking rich boy college classmate. She's earnest, tenacious and crippled by middle-class insecurity; he's talentless and slides by on smile and swagger. It's July 15,......