Karina Longworth
Tomatometer-approved critic
New York
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Killing Them Softly (2012) |
It's a movie that shows, and then tells, tells, and tells again, its vibrant conjuring of contemporary cynicism felled by Dominik's lack of faith in his audience's ability to connect thematic dots. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 27, 2012
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Hitchcock (2012) |
Hitchcock is a movie about bygone Hollywood that's distinctly a product of Hollywood circa now. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 20, 2012
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Silver Linings Playbook (2012) |
Manic as it might be stylistically, emotionally Silver Linings Playbook maintains too even of a keel. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 13, 2012
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Generation P (2011) |
Generation P is long and incredibly dense, but it's never boring-it's too wild and unhinged. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 13, 2012
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Skyfall (2012) |
Skyfall's fatal misstep is its slavish hewing to event-movie trends. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 07, 2012
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The Comedy (2012) |
There's not a false note in the film, but maybe there's a difference between accuracy and truth. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 07, 2012
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The Bay (2012) |
You have to distance yourself from the spot-on simulation of kitsch in order admire it, and that process precludes engagement with it as drama. - Village Voice
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| Posted Nov 01, 2012
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Cloud Atlas (2012) |
One man's ambitious, iconoclastic, like-nothing-ever-before-seen passion project is another man's Battlefield Earth. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted Oct 25, 2012
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The Loneliest Planet (2011) |
Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil. - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 24, 2012
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Fun Size (2012) |
A smart and emotionally satisfying slice of wish fulfillment, tracing how a threatened family finds harmony. - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 23, 2012
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Argo (2012) |
It's an embodiment of the kind of quality adult film that really shouldn't be an endangered species, and a love letter from Affleck to the industry that made him, shunned him, and loves nothing more than to be loved. - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 11, 2012
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Middle of Nowhere (2012) |
Remarkably self-assured ... - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 09, 2012
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Wake in Fright (1971) |
A road movie using undeveloped land as a blank screen on which to project a dark deconstruction of masculinity and manifest destiny. - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 02, 2012
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V/H/S (2012) |
In too many of the shorts, bad acting quickly undermines the "authenticity" the aesthetics labor to achieve. - Village Voice
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| Posted Oct 02, 2012
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Knuckleball! (2012) |
I could watch Phil Niekro reminisce about being owned by Bill Buckner for days. If you know what that means, you probably could, too. - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 18, 2012
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The Master (2012) |
It's a film of breathtaking cinematic romanticism and near-complete denial of conventional catharsis. You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem. - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 11, 2012
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) |
Chbosky plays this CW serial stuff for maximum earnestness, stressing the teenage tendency to assume that every new thing they're feeling is unprecedented in human history, keeping the tone just-moist-eyed throughout. - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 04, 2012
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Detropia (2012) |
Beautifully composed and purposefully edited to a haunting electronic score ... - Village Voice
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| Posted Sep 04, 2012
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The Ambassador (2011) |
You watch both fearing that something spectacularly tragic could happen, and knowing that if this film exists, it probably didn't. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 28, 2012
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Sleepwalk With Me (2012) |
[Rides] a weird tonal line, maybe aiming to split the difference between comedy and terror but coming off as afraid to really go for it on either. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 21, 2012
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Cosmopolis (2012) |
We're supposed to be feeling . . . something. That we don't might be Cronenberg's own endgame. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 14, 2012
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The Campaign (2012) |
Most of the movie's big laughs are in the first half; like so many high-concept/low-character comedies, it runs out of steam early and then wheezes to an anticlimax. - Village Voice
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| Posted Aug 07, 2012
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Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012) |
A notably lo-fi entry into the recent trend of romantic comedies that think acknowledging the genre's clichs is as good as subverting them. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jul 31, 2012
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The Queen of Versailles (2012) |
The film hardly feels hastily pasted together: Greenfield filmed long enough to document physical changes in her subjects. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jul 17, 2012
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Trishna (2011) |
The film's exploration of extremes coexisting uneasily is especially palpable in a subplot involving Mumbai's film industry. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jul 10, 2012
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Union Square (2011) |
Often feels like an acting exercise documented on video for teaching purposes-lots of unnecessary histrionics and ostentatious zooms, with both the story and the improv-like dialogue predicated on contrivances and glaring improbabilities. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jul 10, 2012
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Savages (2012) |
More than two hours long -- and building to two endings, one romantic-tragic and one quasi-ironic and romantic-ludicrous -- Savages is bloated with plot and exposition... - Village Voice
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| Posted Jul 03, 2012
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Katy Perry: Part of Me (2012) |
You never get the sense that the camera was ever allowed to see anything that Perry didn't want it to see. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jul 03, 2012
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Magic Mike (2012) |
The few moments wherein Magic Mike calls American institutions into question are undercut and overshadowed by the film's dated insistence on the dream of legitimacy. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jun 26, 2012
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Lola Versus (2012) |
Narratively, it's not a huge shock where the film ultimately goes, but there are a number of fun surprises along the way. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jun 05, 2012
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Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) |
As indie-film nerd-mances go, this one is genuinely sweet. - Village Voice
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| Posted Jun 05, 2012
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Moonrise Kingdom (2012) |
Its portrait of young love is both mature and defiantly utopian. - Village Voice
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| Posted May 22, 2012
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Beyond the Hills (2012) |
A omething of a disappointment. The initially fascinating, ambiguous relationship between the two young women is overwhelmed by the hysteria spawned by her unflaggingly intense presence at the monastery - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 22, 2012
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In Another Country (2012) |
The presence of Huppert in this one suggests an interest in branching out beyond the cult faithful. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 22, 2012
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Like Someone in Love (2012) |
I was pleasantly disoriented throughout, and I thought the film's final moment was thrilling. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 22, 2012
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Laurence Anyways (2012) |
If anything, it's a bold manifesto aimed at critics like me who have slagged the filmmaker off as all style and no substance. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 21, 2012
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Lawless (2012) |
Never-not-fun junk food enlivened by good actors and a thin ghosting of Hollywood-style "relevancy", but only barely enough actual substance to keep the shoot-em-ups interesting. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 20, 2012
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Amour (2012) |
Haneke is the first Competition film director at Cannes this year to both succeed totally on the terms he sets out for himself, and truly challenge the audience to bear witness to something they've never seen on screen before. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 20, 2012
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Rust and Bone (2012) |
If Audiard's mastery of plastic aesthetics makes this all go down a little too easy, that's maybe the point: perception is deceiving. - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 18, 2012
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Paradise: Love (2012) |
It would be fitting with Seidl's apparent project if Paradise (Love) was, in some sense, a documentary of its own making. But that doesn't make its facile ironies about still-pervasive, post-colonial exploitation and dehumanization any more enlightening - L.A. Weekly
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| Posted May 18, 2012
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Polisse (2011) |
The strange, unsettling juxtapositions, even when mashing up the mawkish and mockery, are full of life. - Village Voice
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| Posted May 15, 2012
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The Dictator (2012) |
Even in its manufactured boundary-pushing-a flash of full-frontal Baron Cohen, another scene set partially inside a birth canal-The Dictator never really risks anything. - Village Voice
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| Posted May 15, 2012
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You Instead (2011) |
The aggressive hipness of the film is queasily dated-it's the cinematic equivalent of the clearance corner at Urban Outfitters. - Village Voice
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| Posted May 08, 2012
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Marvel's the Avengers (2012) |
Really, who cares about another battle? We know how this is going to end. - Village Voice
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| Posted May 01, 2012
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Sound of My Voice (2011) |
The bland, jittery visual "realism" can't counteract overheated performances of tin-eared dialogue, which strain for pulp but often land at soap. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 24, 2012
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Goodbye First Love (2011) |
Goodbye First Love loosely fictionalizes lived experience in order to capture the ineffable-in this case, emotional maturation or, as Sullivan phrases it, "becom[ing] a real person." - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 17, 2012
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Here (2011) |
The dreamy, feverish beauty of these sequences just barely balances out the pretension of the exposition. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 10, 2012
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Keyhole (2011) |
The film is infectiously somnambulant, so convincingly and unrelentingly dreamlike that its sudden end mimics the sensation of snapping awake from deep sleep. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 03, 2012
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We the Party (2012) |
Van Peebles's heart is probably in the right place, but his attempt to wed his kids' generational moment to a classic coming-of-age template falters in its message-obsessed execution. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 03, 2012
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4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011) |
It's both chamber drama and experimental found-footage film, relying heavily on appropriated media to provide context and subtext to its disaster fiction. - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 20, 2012
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