Karina Longworth

From bubblegum-bicurious novelty "I Kissed a Girl" on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead–with-a-wink odes to playacting in a fantasy space of total acceptance and no consequences, sold to children with literal sugarcoating. Her hits are powerful stuff, coming from an artist who was raised by Pentecostal......

Welcome to the recession, boys," says John Travolta's DEA double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone's Savages, based on Don Winslow's novel. Savages is a movie of its moment, though both its good guys and bad guys (if there's really even a difference) are unquestionably the 1 percent of their industry —......

When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike — which the actor conceived and produced based on his own experience as a teenage dancer in an all-male exotic revue — the audience in my screening burst......

1980. Woody Allen has just had the biggest hit of his career with Manhattan — a love letter to the titular city, a romantic celebration of its timeless urban landscape set in a nostalgic-fantastic present, culminating in the gut-punch realization that what's past is irretrievably past. Manhattan's $39 million take......

The Finland-born, Oregon-bred actress Maila Nurmi's resume reads like the stuff of Hollywood legend. A New York showgirl, she was "discovered" in a Mae West revue and put under contract by Howard Hawks, not long after the director turned a fitting model named Betty Perske into Lauren Bacall. (Nurmi destroyed......

With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell hot. But, in an unusual twist for a 20-something performer at the beginning of her career, Plaza's natural foxiness is a resource that has gone largely unexploited. Not exactly a character actress — she hasn't......

The Cannes Film Festival (which ended its two-week run on Saturday) is nothing if not a study in contradictions. Studio product and tabloid fixtures — RPatz! KStew! "Le gentleman Brad," as one daily rag heralded the arrival of annual attendee Pitt — butt up on the red carpet against international......

It's 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky coast of a fictional New England isle. Twelve-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp, absconding with a couple of bedrolls and an air rifle, and leaving behind......

Within hours of its premiere last week at the Cannes Film Festival, Rust and Bone was hailed by some as this year's version of The Artist — i.e., a French import with the potential to ride a wave of Cannes kudos to a big crossover, American mainstream audience. Like The......

The opening credits of the Brad Pitt-starring Killing Them Softly are set to snatches of Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic Convention speech, focused on the notion of "the American promise," jarringly jump-intercut with scenes of Frank (Scoot McNairy) making his way through a tunnel onto a dismal American city street, windblown......