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

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  The Best Films of 2012

  published December 27, 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 >>

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  COVER STORY

  Quentin Tarantino on His Most Ambitious Movie Yet

  published December 20, 2012

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

• The Trouble With Hitchcock

  published November 29, 2012

  Early in Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) walks the red carpet at the premiere of his 1959 chase film,... More >>

• Killing Them Softly Rings a Bell ... Over and Over

  published November 29, 2012

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

• Mostly Cloudy

  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 Lays Bare the Unknowable Spy

  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... More >>

• Puppets and Starlets

  published November 1, 2012

  Sean Baker's Starlet stars Dree Hemingway (Ernest's great-granddaughter) as Jane, a 21-year-old "girl next door" porn performer... More >>

• Fun Size, the Teen Comedy That's Not Bad for You

  published October 25, 2012

  Gossip Girl and The O.C., the two teen TV shows created in the past decade by 36-year-old Josh Schwartz, are sly bait and... More >>

• With Argo, Ben Affleck Asks Us To Love Hollywood Again

  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 >>

• You Aren't Expecting What The Master is Giving

  published September 20, 2012

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

• Meet the Monsters

  published September 13, 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 Can't Quite Rise to the Level of Radio

  published August 30, 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 >>

• Cosmopolis Limos Through the Mind of a Master of the Universe

  published August 30, 2012

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

• Celeste and Jesse Forever Is Too Scattered To Transcend Its Genre

  published August 16, 2012

  In Celeste and Jesse Forever, the titular, newly separated female protagonist's un-flamboyant queer co-worker (Elijah Wood) tells... More >>

• In The Campaign, Hijinks and F-Bombs on the Trail with Will and Zach

  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 >>

• In The Queen of Versailles, Time-Share Royalty's Time Might be Up

  published August 9, 2012

  "I don't want to give you lessons in self-denial and social responsibility," an art dealer tells her billionaire boy client in Don DeLillo's... More >>

• Exploitation Film

  published August 9, 2012

  Like antidepressants, artificial sugars, Botox, and other miracle inventions of the past century, corporate culture became an omnipresent fact... 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: Grown-ups don't catch it. It's... More >>

• Raise a Finger

  published August 2, 2012

  Chinese artist, activist and antagonist Ai Weiwei became a worldwide cause celebre last April when he was arrested by authorities at the... More >>

• In Trishna, Michael Winterbottom takes Hardy's Tess to today's Mumbai

  published July 26, 2012

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

• Savages: Oliver Stone's Drug-trade Drama Settles for Sensation

  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... More >>

• Magic Mike Reveals Its Cast but Is No Revelation

  published June 28, 2012

  When Channing Tatum stood up and revealed his bare ass to the camera a minute or two into Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike —... More >>

• In Safety Not Guaranteed Love Doesn't Mean an Insult to the Audience's Intelligence

  published June 14, 2012

  With her high cheekbones, feline brown eyes and heart-shaped mouth, actress Aubrey Plaza is bombshell hot. But in an unusual... More >>

• Young Love, Wes Anderson-Style in Moonrise Kingdom

  published May 31, 2012

  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,... More >>

• More Culture-Clash Yuks than Comedy Revolution in The Dictator

  published May 17, 2012

  In his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional... More >>