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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  COVER STORY

  Films of 2012: The Ultimate Review

  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 >>

• Films of 2012: Getting Better and Better

  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 >>

• The Trouble with Hitchcock

  published December 6, 2012

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

• Making a Killing in Obama's America

  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 >>

• Mostly Cloudy

  published November 15, 2012

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

• Puppets and Starlets

  published November 8, 2012

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

• James Bond's License to Feel

  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 "official"... More >>

• Auteur Goes Amateur

  published November 1, 2012

  Found-footage eco-horror cheapie The Bay — in which a previously harmless waterborne parasite mutates into an unstoppable... More >>

• Finally, a Treat with Fun Size

  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 >>

• Hearts and Minds

  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 >>

• The Master: From the Window to the Wall

  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 of 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 >>

• Celeste and Jesse Forever

  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 >>

• The Campaign

  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: Grown-ups don't catch it.... More >>

• Compliance

  published August 9, 2012

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

• Trishna

  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

  published July 5, 2012

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

• Magic Mike

  published June 28, 2012

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

• Woody's Roman Holiday

  published June 28, 2012

  Woody Allen has just had the biggest hit of his career with Manhattan — a love letter to the titular city, a romantic celebration... More >>

• The Real Gurl

  published June 28, 2012

  From bubblegum-bi-curious novelty "I Kissed a Girl" on, Katy Perry has built a career on glorious brain-dead-with-a-wink odes to playacting in... More >>

• Young love, Wes Anderson-style, in Moonrise Kingdom

  published June 14, 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, bespectacled... More >>

• Subverting the Rom-Com

  published June 7, 2012

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

• Sacha Baron Cohen's 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 >>

• Things Go Boom in Avengers

  published May 3, 2012

  At the start of Joss Whedon's long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful,... More >>