Email Author Karina Longworth

Awards

• 2011 - Southern California Journalism Awards/LA Press Club

  Film reviews

• 2011 - Southern California Journalism Awards/LA Press Club, published February 5, 2010

  "Sundance's Rebel Yell"

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2012 Stories by Karina Longworth

• Quentin Tarantino on the making of Django Unchained

  published December 27, 2012

  Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it's starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature, Django... More >>

• 

  Karina Longworth's top ten films of 2012

  published December 20, 2012

  More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 "best" movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I'd have 25 unnumbered... More >>

• Killing Them Softly is a hyper-violent crime drama

  published November 29, 2012

  An adaptation of George V. Higgins's 1974 novel Cogan's Trade, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly anatomizes a... More >>

• Hitchcock takes on old-world Hollywood with a reality-TV influence

  published November 29, 2012

  Early in Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins with a sack of fat connecting chin to neck) walks the red... More >>

• Strong performances carry the intriguing Middle of Nowhere

  published November 22, 2012

  When Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi) tells the new man in her life that she likes "indie" movies, it's both a declaration of identity and a dare.... More >>

• The gritty Silver Linings Playbook is also a bit of a fairy tale

  published November 22, 2012

  Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together... More >>

• Skyfall drags 007's psyche through the interrogation process

  published November 8, 2012

  If Hollywood's rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can't say that Skyfall — the 23rd... More >>

• Julia Loktev fills The Loneliest Planet with beauty and dramatic tension

  published November 8, 2012

  The Loneliest Planet begins with a close-up trained on the body of a beautiful woman, naked and trembling. It's not what it... More >>

• The honest Detropia is an elegy for Motown-era Detroit

  published October 18, 2012

  When it comes to cost-cutting, downsizing and philosophical and practical compromise, how low is it possible to go before there's nothing left... More >>

• In Decoding Deepak, a son chronicles his father's private and public lives

  published October 11, 2012

  Made and narrated by a son in an attempt to reconcile his own perception of his father with that of the public at large, Gotham Chopra's... More >>

• The symbolism in Argo's wisecracking script is impossible to miss

  published October 11, 2012

  Perhaps more than any other male American star of his generation, Ben Affleck understands the narrative advantage of having Hollywood on your... More >>

• Stylistic consistencies in V/H/S draw attention to inconsistent performances

  published October 4, 2012

  In the faux-found-footage horror anthology V/H/S (containing material directed by Joe Swanberg, Adam Wingard, Ti West and... More >>

• The Perks of Being a Wallflower revisits pre-Internet adolescence

  published September 27, 2012

  As someone who was in college when Napster happened, I'd love to see a period piece re-creating teen life during the last moments before... More >>

• The Master rises and falls on the magnetic pull of its stars

  published September 20, 2012

  There's something startlingly noncommittal about many of the initial reviews of The Master that leaked out following the... More >>

• Karina Longworth tells all about TIFF

  published September 20, 2012

  A critic's report from a film festival like Toronto, where something like 300 features were unveiled from September 6 through 16, can be... More >>

• Sleepwalk With Me tells more than it shows

  published September 13, 2012

  It's pretty Pollyannaish to complain when companies that are in the business of making money on movies make certain movies solely to make... More >>

• By going undercover, The Ambassador earns its suspension of disbelief

  published September 13, 2012

  The blitzkrieg of award season is right around the corner, and with it, we can expect an onslaught of stunt performances designed to wow... More >>

• The meta-text of Cosmopolis runs out of steam early

  published August 23, 2012

  Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has managed to fill the... More >>

• The Campaign is toothless but amusing

  published August 9, 2012

  The Campaign begins with an on-screen quote attributed to Ross Perot: "War has rules. Mud-wrestling has rules. Politics has no... More >>

• Julie Delpy rocks New York

  published August 9, 2012

  "My son is sick right now, covered in zits. It's not contagious—I mean, it's contagious, but don't worry: Grownups don't catch it. It's... More >>

• Craig Zobel on Documenting Sexual Degradation With Humanity

  published August 9, 2012

  Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact... More >>

• In The Queen of Versailles, the rich eat you

  published August 2, 2012

  Vividly bringing to life the question of whether self-denial is a social responsibility that Don DeLillo poses in Cosmopolis, Lauren... More >>

• Trishna sets Thomas Hardy's Tess in modern-day India

  published July 26, 2012

  Michael Winterbottom is multi-tasking — like that's a surprise. He's made a dozen films in the past decade, as varied as the Steve... More >>

• Memory and emotion inform the elliptical Goodbye First Love

  published July 12, 2012

  Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve's third feature, Goodbye First Love, begins in 1999, when protagonist Camille (Lola Créton), a... More >>

• Savages deals a heavy hand, but skimps on soul

  published July 5, 2012

  "Welcome to the recession, boys," says John Travolta's DEA-double-agent profiteer in Oliver Stone's Savages, based on Don Winslow's... More >>