Karina Longworth

Win Win

Karina Longworth
WIN WIN Paul Giamatti continues contemporary cinema's longest pre-midlife crisis in Win Win as Mike, yet another schlubby 40-something flummoxed by mundane personal problems. Mike is the coach of the county's worst high school wrestling team, and his failing small-town law practice has accrued a mountain of debt, which he's......
Mia Wasikowska

Jane Eyre Review

Karina Longworth
If Jane Eyre is not the greatest of the Great Books with a permanent position on required reading lists, it may be the most frequently filmed: At least 10 cinematic versions of the story have been made, dating back to the dawn of the silent era — if you count......
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Redland Review

Karina Longworth
The dark, hallucinatory fable Redland, a 2009 film festival lapper just now receiving a limited release, begins and climaxes with two of the most audacious sex-meets-death set pieces in recent indie-movie memory. What's even more daring: First-time director Asiel Norton decided to shoot this starless, elliptical, defiantly mythic feature on......

Red Riding Hood

Karina Longworth
RED RIDING HOOD In a wintry woodland in an unspecified time long, long ago, teen beauty Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is arranged to marry brooding, hunky, rich dude Henry (Max Irons), but is plotting to run away with brooding, hunky peasant Peter (Shiloh Fernandez). Then — bummer! — Valerie's sister is......
The "Adonis" of Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats

Heartbeats Review

Karina Longworth
The second feature from 21-year-old wunderkind Xavier Dolan, Heartbeats is an Instagram of The Way We Fuck Now — or, more precisely, the way gorgeously costumed and coiffed French-Canadian early-20-somethings fuck and/or fail to fuck, while tripping over their misguided attempts to land in love. The film bounces between montages......
The Red Chapel

The Red Chapel Review

Karina Longworth
Produced by Lars Von Trier's Zentropa and partially shot through a fish-eye lens for maximum surreality, The Red Chapel documents director Mads Brügger's trip to Pyongyang with Jacob and Simon, Korean-born comedians raised in Denmark (the former is a developmentally disabled teenager who describes himself as "spastic"). To the North......
Elvira

Elvira Live

Karina Longworth
At the height of her fame as horror hostess/spooky sexpot spokeswoman Elvira, Cassandra Peterson made a bold move to expand the brand that began as a kitschy staple of local late-night TV. The 1988 feature Elvira, Mistress of the Dark — co-written by and starring Peterson, and funded by NBC......

The Adjustment Bureau

Karina Longworth
THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU In Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter George Nolfi's directorial debut, Matt Damon plays David Norris, a congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race, apparently on the strength of charisma. He cute-meets enigmatic dancer Elise (Emily Blunt), but after a deeply romantic, impulsive kiss, Elise disappears. The would-be......

Dear Lemon Lima

Karina Longworth
DEAR LEMON LIMA Thanks in part to her half-Eskimo heritage, brainy freshman Vanessa (Savanah Wiltfong) lands a scholarship at an exclusive public high school, where she finds herself unexpectedly ostracized by the blond, athletics-obsessed student body. "Why does God hate me so much?" she asks her diary, which she addresses......
Gena Rowlands

John Cassavetes Series at Cinefamily

Karina Longworth
"We only have two hours to change people's lives." So John Cassavetes told an interviewer in 1972, while promoting Minnie and Moskowitz — a cracked romcom that can be read as an attempt to reconcile and justify Cassavetes' own passionate, logic-testing, life-defining marriage to Gena Rowlands — and it's hard......