Karina Longworth

Casa de Mi Padre is a Spanish-language comedy starring Will Ferrell as a simple-minded, asexual Mexican cowboy who welcomes the return of his prodigal brother, Raul (Diego Luna), to the family ranch but eyes Raul's beautiful fiancée with suspicion. The movie is, at its base, a spoof of telenovelas and......

Three local venues are partnering this weekend to screen films by Jon Jost, a self-taught artist whose work ranges from filmed features to avant-garde digital essays. While on Sunday L.A. Filmforum will host the U.S. premiere of Jost's 2010 experimental video Swimming to Nebraska — which he describes as "an......

In 2010, the internationally celebrated Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was arrested at his home. A neorealist who has been a vocal opponent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime, Panahi was accused of " in a gathering and carrying out propaganda against the system" and sentenced to six years in prison; he also......

Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Being Flynn is an adaptation of Nick Flynn's 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which explored the author's pivotal experience working at the Boston homeless shelter where his down-and-out dad, Jonathan, was a frequent guest. In the movie, Paul Dano and Robert......

To say that only Harvey Weinstein could land a Best Picture Oscar for a silent film, as he is expected to do Sunday for The Artist, is more than just a reflection of the mogul's resurgent power of persuasion over Academy members -- it's actually true. A silent film has......

Based in Los Angeles and trained at UCLA's film school, Nina Menkes has made five feature films in 26 years, all of them appropriating Hollywood genres — noir, horror, procedurals — as raw matter for wildly nonlinear works dedicated to scrambling conventional narrative logic and gender politics. "Nina Menkes: Cinema......

"He's sooo hot," the woman sitting next to me at the screening of Safe House sighed to her friend as the film's opening images of Ryan Reynolds working out flashed on the screen. She then went on to fiddle with her BlackBerry for half the movie. Based on those two......

It's potentially dangerous to look at the lineup of the Sundance Film Festival (which ended Sunday) as a reflection of the character of contemporary indie film, the collective American consciousness or, well, anything. But there's no question that the festival's 2012 edition was stuffed with films in some way touched......

After eight days in Park City, I'm back in Los Angeles; the festival continues through the weekend, with the awards announced Saturday night. Here are some notes on films I didn't get a chance to write about at length. Keep an eye out for my wrap-up of the festival in......