Karina Longworth

An old-fashioned totalitarian leader might have taken over the media after assuming control of the state; contemporary Italy elected a man who already monopolized its media. According to Erik Gandini's intoxicating documentary Videocracy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's power over the people dates back to long before his 1994 election. One......

"There was always sex in Hollywood," Sam Wasson writes in the introduction to his new book, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. "But before Breakfast at Tiffany's, only the bad girls were having it." Equal parts production history and biography, creative nonfiction and cultural critique, 5 A.M. is most fascinating as an......

At last night's The Power of the Tweet Poolside Chat and the LA Film Festival, moderator Ari Karpel asked filmmaker Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales) what initially attracted him to Twitter. "It was almost out of fear of being left behind," said the forward-thinking filmmaker. "The internet, to sort......

Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me is a nasty little noir novel about Lou Ford, deputy sheriff of a small Texas town, a seemingly nice guy hiding a "sickness" that eventually compels him to kill everyone he loves. In typical Thompson fashion, the prose is straightforward, the underlying themes thorny......

So one-sided that it nearly validates what the Right says about Hollywood's liberal crusaders, Oliver Stone's essay/lecture/travelogue South of the Border is propaganda in the form of a home movie, documenting Stone's summer vacation spent in the collegial company of the figureheads of various South American states. About 10 minutes......

The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF), which opens tonight with the L.A. premiere of Lisa Cholodenko's KCRW-crowd-pleasing gay-marriage rom-dramedy The Kids Are All Right, will uphold a few traditions from previous years. The directors of the 16 films in the Narrative and Documentary competitions will have just returned from......

You could hear it — and smell it — but you couldn't see it. Last Friday night, a movie theater opened at Madang, a brand-new upscale mini-mall just north of the corner of Wilshire and Western. Madang means "courtyard" in Korean, and in a nod to traditional Korean architecture, the......

Lecturing at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival after a screening of The Great Sacrifice, the hallucinatory romance directed by the notorious Veit Harlan, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek declared Harlan the one great Nazi-era German auteur whose films "cannot be redeemed." It was not a simple condemnation: Zizek also once named......

That documentary about the Mormon church's nefarious (and successful) plot to outlaw gay marriage in California, 8: The Mormon Proposition, had its LA premiere Tuesday night at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The film, which juxtaposes the horror stories of gay Mormons with the revelation of the Church's own internal......