Karina Longworth

A mash-up of cinema and journalism, document and performance; a concert film sandwiched between a mission statement and a staged punctuation to a career: the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut up and Play the Hits offers more basic narrative satisfaction than many of the fiction films shown here using documentary aesthetics......

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A coming-of-age tale infused with post-9/11 anxiety, Margaret features Anna Paquin as Lisa, a 17-year-old whose role in a fatal Upper West Side bus accident leads her to act out sexually, antagonize her self-absorbed single mom and obsessively pursue retribution on behalf of the accident victim. (There is no character......

The theme of the 2012 New Frontier -- the Sundance section devoted to installation work, experimental film and video and art utilizing/ exploring emergent technology -- is "Future Normal." At a preview of the lineup held for press, programmer Shari Frilot defined that branded theme as reflective of an attempt......

Broken social and economic systems, and the broken lives and homes they leave in their wake, have been a big theme at Sundance this year. Across documentaries and fiction features, broached directly and indirectly, it seems the new American dream is a longing for the old normal; accumulation or advancement......

Jaw-dropping news came down around noon Park City time Monday, when Sundance issued a press release confirming that Bingham Ray -- indie film legend, co-founder of seminal '90s indie distribution outlet October Films and current executive director of the San Francisco Film Society -- had died. Ray, who was only......

With Monday marking the midway point of my stay in Park City, here's a notebook dump on a few films I haven't had a chance to write about at length......

The first image in Detropia, the excellent new documentary about the decline of Detroit from filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp), is of a conductor raising his baton to lead an orchestra. It's a clue that what we're about to see is a city symphony film, in the......

The most divisive dramatic competition entry yet to screen at Sundance, Simon Killer is the second feature directed by Antonio Campos, director of Afterschool and producer of last year's Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene. Like Martha Marcy, Simon is built around an attractive, enigmatic young person whose ostensible recent......

Mads Brugger is sort of the VICE magazine version of Sasha Baron Cohen, as financed by Lars Von Trier. His last film was The Red Chapel, an exercise in hidden camera comedy with unusual socio-political stakes, which I put on my top 10 list for 2010. In Chapel, Danish journalist......