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.
As Don Argott’s documentary The Art of the Steal informs us more than once, Henri Matisse called the Barnes Foundation, Albert C. Barnes suburban Philadelphia shrine to his own hot-shit art collection, “the only sane place to look at art in America.” A proudly one-sided vilification of the collaboration of state and corporate forces in [...]
Capitalism: A Love Story begins with a brilliantly edited montage equating our current state of despair with the fall of ancient Rome. This leads into a typically Michael Moorean voiceover pondering what our civilization will be remembered for centuries after our demise: funny cat videos, or the forced evictions resulting from the mortgage crisis? The [...]
At film festivals, you usually have to make a choice between seeing about a quarter of the program and writing about everything you see, or seeing as much as you can and writing about very little of it. I usually opt for the former strategy, but at this year’s TIFF, I decided to switch it [...]
Note: I’ve seen about 20 films that I have not yet found time to write about, so welcome to the first in a series of very brief writeups. Some things may be worth revisiting, and if so I’ll do so if and when they get a US release.
A nuclear bomb is dropped on Tokyo, killing [...]
Werner Herzog’s emphatic declarations that he’s never seen Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant finally seem credible. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans plays as nothing if not a work-for-hire project, with Herzog approaching a story and cultural lineage to which he obviously has no innate connection, and imprinting his own flourishes and concerns . [...]
I should note that on my actual third day in Toronto, I saw two films that I’m not going to be able to write about on just one viewing: The Road and A Serious Man. If you follow my Twitter updates, you’ll know that I was blown away by the former and don’t know what [...]
Day 2 at TIFF 2009 brought on the two films at this festival that could be thought of as Juno followups: the Jason Reitman-directed Up in the Air, starring George Clooney as a traveling merchant of vocational death and Vera Farmiga as the woman who induces his midlife attack of consciousness; and Jennifer’s Body, starring [...]
A film festival as large as Toronto often opens up opportunities for accidental if unusually appropriate double features, but sometimes these juxtapositions can give a film a not totally fair disadvantage. Grant Heslov’s The Men Who Stare at Goats is, by any measure, a failed film, but seen, as I saw it, in front of [...]
Before I go forth with reports from my first 19 hours in Toronto — over the course of which I’ve seen three films, attended one party where waitresses were literally physically branded with the name of the skincare conglomerate sponsor, spent a morning at the Canadian Broadcast Center doing a radio segment about the festival [...]
Peter Knegt points to 45 seconds of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which debuts at TIFF this week and then comes to NYFF in about a month. It’s sort of a trailer, and it’s everything you could hope for from a teaser for a shot-on-circa-80s-VHS portrait of Korinean freaks at play. That green analog noise fadeout [...]
Silent Light finally becomes available in the US on DVD today. Here’s what I wrote about it when it screened at Film Forum in January.
“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf.
Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week [...]
Robert Lloyd’s review of the new At the Movies, which debuted on TV this past weekend, hits on a good point that often gets lost in the, “Wow, The Two Bens were bad” pile-on. It’s not just that neither was very good, but that even in their badness, they were poorly matched:
Mankiewicz (grandson of “Citizen [...]
When Beavis and Butthead debuted on MTV’s Liquid Television in the very early 90s, it was not at all conceivable that its creator, animator and primary voice actor Mike Judge would, over the course of two decades, build a career that eventually conformed to the key points on the Troubled Maverick Timeline. First with those [...]
The lineup for the Telluride Film Festival, which begins tomorrow, has just been released. For the first time since the launch of this blog, Spout will not be covering Telluride this year, so I’ve quickly scanned the lineup and picked out some highlights that you should try to check out if you’re in town:
The one [...]
The Sundance Film Festival has announced that in 2010 they’ll launch a new programming sidebar called NEXT, designed to reflect the fact that “a new aesthetic enlisting low-and no-budget filmmaking techniques has been on the rise.” According to the press release sent out this morning, Sundance “staffers refer to the new section with the symbol [...]
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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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