From June 2007 to October 2009, Karina Longworth was the editor of SpoutBlog. A film and new media blogger/critic based in Brooklyn, she was also the co-founder/editor of Cinematical. Karina is a regular contributor to the national morning radio show The Takeaway, and has freelanced for TimeOut New York, indieWIRE, Slate, Vulture, The Daily Beast, Filmmaker, Las Vegas Weekly and other print and online publications. She has a BFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University.
Call it a study in failed tourism: in four expeditions into urban Abu Dhabi in search of specific destinations, I got lost and gave up before getting there three times. The problem — at least, its a problem for us New Yorkers; I’m sure it makes perfect sense to Abu Dhabi residents –– is that [...]
Since first premiering at Berlinale in February, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Shock Doctrine has itself absorbed a couple of major shocks. In the intervening months, the film has been recut (or, as Whitecross put it when introducing Shock in Abu Dhabi this week, “finished”) for fine tuning and to add material about the [...]
I’m not sure what it means that one weekend, I sit on a film festival panel about criticism and barely get a word in edgewise, and the next weekend become the center of a scandal on another film festival panel while actually physically attending yet another film festival on the opposite side of the globe. [...]
“I’m at the film festival. I’m at the mall multiplex. I’m at the combination film festival venue/mall multiplex.”
So I tweeted from the Toronto Film Festival this year, in a quick-wink rewrite of Das Racist’s avant-retarde one-liner critique of contemporary global capitalism and cultural homogenization, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Twitter is rarely a venue [...]
The Middle East International Film Festival is entering into its third edition. For its first two years, the fest was produced by Pyramedia, the production company of Oprah-esque media multi-hyphenate Nashwa al-Ruwaini, which is also responsible for Prince of Poets, a Eurostar-esque competition dedicated to original poetry that draws huge TV audiences in the region. [...]
The flight from JFK to Abu Dhabi was twelve hours, non-stop. Once I figured out how to recline my sleeping pod seat, I slept for eight of them. I spent the rest of the flight exploring the on-board entertainment system. I watched an episode of Mad Men, an E! Special on sexy celeb style or [...]
Lone Scherfig’s An Education is an extremely classy film –– classy as in modish, classy as in overtly concerned with class, and both ultimately at the expense of digging as deep as it could into the gut ugliness of first heartbreak. It’s about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), an Oxford-bound beauty in 1960s suburban London, the pet [...]
If you know nothing else about Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which screened at the New York Festival on Thursday night just four months after the VHS cameras started to roll, you’ve probably heard it described, either positively or negatively, as “not really a movie.” As Korine himself put it before the screening, “I don’t know [...]
This review was originally published during the Toronto Film Festival. The Invention of Lying opens today.
The Invention of Lying begins with a voiceover by the film’s co-writer/director and star Ricky Gervais, referring in the third person to his image on screen as that of a “chubby little loser.” Various variations of this epithet will be [...]
I haven’t weighed in on the Roman Polanski clusterfuck, because I feel strongly that I shouldn’t add to the noise on any given scandale du jour unless I actually have something original, relevant and new to say. So far, I haven’t. But in trying to find an angle from which I could approach the story, [...]
If you can imagine Mike Leigh directing an In the Loop-esque deadpan comedy embedded within a British version of The Sopranos, in which Tony is an embittered ex-hippie in passive-aggressive conflict with his pot-dulled but surprisingly ruthless adult son, then you might be able to wrap your head around Down Terrace, which won the juried [...]
Photo via Devin Faraci’s TwitPic
The formula for a productive, engaging debate on the state of indie film? Take a festival founder and a controversial filmmaker, throw them in a boxing ring, and add a hundred or so hecklers and a lot of cheap booze. Also, a stars and stripes unitard wouldn’t hurt. And, voila — [...]
Frownland, Ronald Bronstein’s award winning, very nearly unbearably bleak ode to the white blind rage inspired by the mundane, will be released tomorrow on DVD by Factory 25. It’s rare that I get a chance to drop the phrases “award winning” and “unbearably bleak” in such quick succession in conversation about the same film, but [...]
Let it not be said that today’s nerds are indifferent to history. For the second year in a row, Fantastic Fest has set aside a portion of its program to pay tribute to classic pink films. Think of these unclassifiable softcore B movies as Japan’s answer to Roger Corman: some are schlocky fun, some are [...]
Everyone Else is a film in which a German couple travel to Sardinia and watch, almost as if helplessly, as their seemingly solid relationship erodes upon contact with foreign forces. Director Maren Ade, in her second feature, shows an uncanny ability to produce a queasy irony from the twinning of surface beauty and interpersonal ugliness. [...]
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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