Karina Longworth

Tilda Swinton in We Need To Talk About Kevin

Cannes 2011: Teenage Death Trip Double Feature

Karina Longworth
My Cannes 2011 began with a kind of American teenage death trip double feature: the world premieres of Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Gus Van Sant's Restless. The non-linear Kevin, based on a novel by Lionel Shriver, stars Tilda Swinton as Eve, the mother of Kevin......
Kristen Wiig sizes up Rose Byrne in Bridesmaids.; Credit: PHOTO BY SUZANNE HANOVER

Bridesmaids Review

Karina Longworth
Bridesmaids is a high-profile test case. Directed by Paul Feig (a sitcom journeyman lovingly known as the creator of Freaks and Geeks), it's the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand's dude-centric point of view. It's also built......
Love Exposure

Love Exposure, A Serbian Film and the sex-negative genre film

Karina Longworth
The era of pornsploitation is upon us. Two recent landmarks of international genre film are having their local debuts this weekend: Sion Sono's four-hour Japanese epic Love Exposure (2008) and Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film (2010). Both are set in a time and place where porn is pervasive but still......

Stake Land Review

Karina Longworth
Post-apocalypse slow-burner Stake Land, produced by Larry Fessenden, is Jim Mickle and Nick Damici's follow-up to the killer-rats-infest-the-Lower-East-Side flick Mulberry Street. It's an ambitious hybrid, grafting the ethereal, landscape-driven, light-infused beauty and naif narration associated with Terrence Malick onto a tale in which struggle against supernatural forces is just one......
Two "stars" of It Felt Like a Kiss

Adam Curtis' It Felt Like a Kiss

Karina Longworth
Rock Hudson. Saddam Hussein. Lee Harvey Oswald. Doris Day. Enos the Chimp. And everyone above level seven at the CIA. So goes the “cast” list, in order of billing, of Adam Curtis’ It Felt Like a Kiss, which has a rare screening at Echo Park Film Center on Saturday. Like......

Water for Elephants

Karina Longworth
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS Water for Elephants falls in the grand line of star vehicles designed to pull back the curtain on the Hollywood sausage-making process just enough to remind audiences that stars—particularly the fresh, young, fuckable variety—are totally awesome. This story of “pretty much the most famous circus disaster in......
Ladies who knit: Michelle Williams and Shirley Henderson in Meek's Cutoff

Meek's Cutoff: Go West, Young Women

Karina Longworth
Meek's Cutoff, like all of director Kelly Reichardt's previous features (River of Grass, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy), is essentially a road movie about both the unequal distribution of power and resources and the frustrations of the disenfranchised. Tracking three hungry and thirsty families on the long wagon journey from......
Kevin Smith; Credit: PHOTO BY KEVIN SCANLON

Kevin Smith: "I Am So, Like, Sick of Movies and Shit"

Karina Longworth
Kevin Smith exhales a cloud of pot smoke. “Does this bother you?” he asks, looking up from his pipe as I enter his backstage dressing room at Denver’s Paramount Theater. Smith has retreated here, alone, after an hour and 15 minutes spent onstage answering questions from hundreds of his rabid......

Arthur

Karina Longworth
ARTHUR In this rethink of the 1981 screwball throwback, the titular drunken heir, originally played by lovable lump Dudley Moore, has been rebuilt to suit slinky British sleaze-comedian Russell Brand, whose constant nattering rarely transcends throat-clearing improv. The film apparently takes place in the present day (cue recession reference), although......

Arthur

Karina Longworth
ARTHUR In this rethink of the 1981 screwball throwback, the titular drunken heir, originally played by lovable lump Dudley Moore, has been rebuilt to suit slinky British sleaze-comedian Russell Brand, whose constant nattering rarely transcends throat-clearing improv. The film apparently takes place in the present day (cue recession reference), although......