Ella Taylor

To 'Fill The Void,' A Choice With A Personal Cost

Ella Taylor — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Driving home from a screening of the ravishing new Israeli film Fill the Void, I caught sight of a young man in full Hasidic garb, trying to coax his toddler son across a busy Los Angeles street.

Greta Gerwig, Blithely Spirited As 'Frances Ha'

Ella Taylor — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Long a darling of the New York indie scene, Noah Baumbach came to filmmaking with a solid pedigree: His father is a film theorist and his mother was a movie critic at the Village Voice (where I've contributed myself).

But after his first hit comedy, Kicking and Screaming, the writer-director developed a habit not uncommon among novice filmmakers: He mistook clever disdain for insight.

'Venus and Serena': Champs Atop Their Game

Ella Taylor — Thu, 09 May 2013 20:54:00 +0000

What's left to know about Venus and Serena Williams? Probably not much that the tennis titans would be willing to share, given how heavily exposed they've been already, and how eager the press has been to wedge the sisters into ready-made narratives about race, celebrity and the daughters of a Svengali.

The lively if slightly worshipful new documentary Venus and Serena breaks little new ground in this regard.

'Love Is All You Need,' Unless Character Matters

Ella Taylor — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:03:00 +0000

When a husband steps out on his wife while she's getting chemo, she's entitled to a weekend in the Mediterranean with Pierce Brosnan, right?

Right, but I believe he went there quite recently with Meryl Streep, did he not, albeit without the cancer? I didn't much care for Mamma Mia!, but the garish musical at least embraced its vulgarity with a full heart and a toe-tapping ABBA soundtrack.

'At Any Price': What Cost A Win?

Ella Taylor — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:59:00 +0000

Like last year's fracking drama Promised Land, the new movie At Any Price is about farm people getting pushed around by corporations — except that there's no Matt Damon to rescue them, cleanse his soul and snag Rosemarie DeWitt in the bargain.

Indie director Ramin Bahrani's first Hollywood picture is far from a David-and-Goliath story, though, and it's certainly not The Waltons Face Down Monsanto.

A 'House' Divided, Over Stories Lived And Told

Ella Taylor — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Among the semi-literate journals submitted by his high-school students, jaded French literature teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is jazzed to find a rough diamond from a new pupil, Claude (Ernst Umhauer).

In weekly installments, the ingratiating but enigmatic teenager, who looks as though he just stepped out of a Pasolini movie, chronicles his efforts to insinuate himself into the family of one his classmates, an amiable but awkward underachiever named Rapha (Bastien Ughetto).

Recognizing a potential talent, Germain, a failed novelist and champion of the classics, begins to nurture the bo

A Class-Concious Romp With 'The Angels' Share' Of Charm

Ella Taylor — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Responding to the death of Margaret Thatcher earlier this week, film director Ken Loach told The Guardian: "Mass unemployment, factory closures, communities destroyed — this is her legacy. She was a fighter, and her enemy was the British working class."

Loach speaks from experience: He began his tireless chronicling of the plight of Britain's underclass long before Thatcher came to power, and he didn't go much easier on Labour governments before or after her tenure as a Tory prime minister.

'Before And After' Dinner, Andre Is Still Talking

Ella Taylor — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:03:00 +0000

In 1981, avant-garde theater director Andre Gregory collaborated with his friend Wallace Shawn and French filmmaker Louis Malle on an oddball project they called My Dinner with Andre.

Now enshrined as a classic — and one of the most-lampooned films in the history of American cinema — the movie is a talky two-hander in which Gregory (or someone very like him) gassed away about his globe-trotting adventures in spiritual enlightenment, while Shawn (or someone very like him) listened in disbelief, then grew entranced.

Public response tended to divide between those who thought My D

Past Pains, Buried Deep 'Down The Shore'

Ella Taylor — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:03:00 +0000
If you want to tell a story, the professional tale-spinners say, make something happen.
That's true, but a happening can be defined as elastically as the teller needs it to be. Sometimes it's a shift in a character's inner landscape — a change in her responses to the common hurts and losses that she's lugged around from childhood — that moves us more than a third-act gunshot ever could.
Down the Shore, a modestly scaled independent film set on the Jersey Shore, is billed as a thriller.

An 'Admission' That Moms Might Not Know Best

Ella Taylor — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:08:00 +0000
Half an hour into Paul Weitz's new comedy, Admission, it dawned on me that I was watching an Americanized About a Boy -- which admittedly was also directed by Weitz. Both movies are adapted from other people's novels; both cobble together families out of the waifs and strays of modern life.
But where About a Boy was both funny and wise about urban alienation, Admission settles for skin deep.
Admission's plot hovers in the vicinity of two square-peg boys. One is small, black, adopted from Uganda and yearning for a normal life.

Whatever Happened To The Real Gingers And Rosas?

Ella Taylor — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:33:00 +0000
A few weeks ago, I asked a class of college undergraduates what the 1960s meant to them.
"That flower-power thing?" one young man volunteered brightly.
The further we get from that misunderstood decade, the more the many strands of its rebelliousness get reduced to a pop-culture T-shirt slogan, a cartoon strip starring tie-dyed youth with stoned eyes and floor-mop hair.
But in London, where I came of age in the mid-'60s, "that flower-power thing" came late — and, by North American standards, pretty watered down.

'Hava Nagila: The Movie' Pays Homage To Unlikely Jewish Touchstone

Ella Taylor — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:03:00 +0000
I grew up on "Hava Nagila," and I'll admit it's not the catchiest of tunes. The ingenuous Hebrew lyrics ("Come!

'Inescapable' Ambiguities In Prewar Syria

Ella Taylor — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:03:00 +0000
It's hard to imagine an upside to the civil war now causing unspeakable suffering in Syria. But the conflict has turned out to be a break for the makers of Inescapable, a feverish political thriller written and directed by Ruba Nadda, a Canadian of Syrian origin whose last film was the languorous 2009 romance Cairo Time.
Set in Damascus in 2011, on the eve of the uprising against President Bashar Assad, the movie minces no words about the brutal police state he has kept in trim since the 2000 death of his father, Hafez Assad.

'Shanghai Calling,' And The Answer Is, 'Why Not?'

Ella Taylor — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:03:00 +0000
As Ugly Americans go, Manhattan corporate attorney Sam Chao (Daniel Henney) has a lot going for him. He's a handsome dude with perfectly symmetrical features, a toned bod we get to peek at all but naked, and facile charm to burn.
He also happens to be the son of Chinese immigrants, but he has brushed aside his heritage along with anything else that might get in the way of making partner. So when his bosses suddenly banish Sam to the boondocks — as he sees it — of Shanghai to open a new office for the firm, he complies in a mighty sulk.

'Lore': After Hitler, An Awakening For The Reich's Children

Ella Taylor — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:04:00 +0000
It took years for our fictions to consider the Holocaust narrative. And for an even longer time, a stunned silence hovered over the fate of "Hitler's children" — ordinary Germans during and after World War II.

'Yossi': Out In Israel, And That's Just Fine

Ella Taylor — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:57:00 +0000
In the decade since Israeli director Eytan Fox made Yossi & Jagger, the precursor to his sublimely tender new drama Yossi, Israel has undergone two significant changes. A tacit and active homophobia has given way, at least in the open cultural climate of Tel Aviv, to a matter-of-fact acceptance of gay rights.

'My People,' My People: A French Farce Misfires

Ella Taylor — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:03:00 +0000
If Tolstoy was right about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way, the cinema of domestic dysfunction will likely never die. But it has gotten awfully droopy, mired in familiar plotting, quasi-wise psychobabble, or — in the case of so many comedies — a knowing prankishness (I'm looking at you, Judd Apatow) that wearies the soul.
I'm fairly sure that with his excitable first feature, Let My People Go, the French director Mikael Buch means to turn the well-worn tropes of Jewish family comedy inside out.

Literary-Minded Teen Comedy More Stuck Than 'Struck'

Ella Taylor — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:03:00 +0000
There isn't much to say about Struck by Lightning, except that it's one of those interchangeable teen movies that lands in theaters in early January, the morgue for films nobody knows what to do with.

A Touching, Tragic Look At 'Amour' In Autumn

Ella Taylor — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:27:00 +0000
We know from the outset that there's a death coming in Michael Haneke's Amour, a magisterial study of mortality that carried off the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival — and currently tops best-picture lists all over the world.

'Save The Date': Something Borrowed, Not Much New

Ella Taylor — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:03:00 +0000
You might know Lizzy Caplan, eternal sidekick, as Jason Segel's girlfriend on television's Freaks and Geeks. Or as the struggling comedienne from Party Down, or the vampire vegan on True Blood, or from the movie The Bachelorette earlier this year?
If none of the above rings a bell, you must have registered her as the memorably belligerent alt-girl Janis Ian in the 2004 movie Mean Girls, which might not have become the best teen movie of the decade without her.

Fighting For Their Family, One Day At A Time

Ella Taylor — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:03:00 +0000
It would take a heart of stone — or zero tolerance for soap — to resist Any Day Now, a full-throttle weepie about a West Hollywood gay couple trying to adopt a neglected boy with Down syndrome.
Their quest might be an easier one today, when 16 American states permit joint adoption for same-sex couples, and all manner of family forms proliferate on and off-screen. But the film, loosely taken from real-life events, is set in 1979, when institutional homophobia was as common as pointy collars on loud print shirts.

A Historical Comedy That Hangs On The Details

Ella Taylor — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 22:03:00 +0000
In Hyde Park on Hudson — a sly, modestly subversive dramedy about a crucial weekend meeting between England's King George VI and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the eve of World War II — the diffident young monarch (Samuel West) confides his frustration over his lifelong stutter while the two men enjoy a postprandial drink expressly forbidden by their womenfolk.
"That damn stutter, these useless legs," says the president (Bill Murray), going on to bestow fatherly advice about the need to project confidence.

An Aging 'Quartet,' Still Polishing Their Legends

Ella Taylor — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:03:00 +0000
"Wrinklies," a widely accepted British term for elderly people, is by a generous margin more affectionate fun than the anodyne euphemisms we use here in the United States, where many of us fear crow's-feet almost as much as we do death.

A Rocker's 'Solo' Slide, Intimately Chronicled

Ella Taylor — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 22:03:00 +0000
Ungracefully aging rockers have long been stock figures of fun at the movies, with Bill Nighy topping the burnout charts in Love, Actually. Lately, though, a slew of former rock kings have enjoyed fresh renown via documentaries like Anvil, The Other F-Word and the upcoming Beware of Mr. Baker, many of which chart a Christ-like saga of meteoric rise, catastrophic fall and painfully slow resurrection.

'Hitchcock': Mr. And Mrs. 'Master Of Suspense'

Ella Taylor — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:03:00 +0000
When my nieces were small, I took them on a day trip to the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank.

'Anna Karenina,' Rushing Headlong Toward Her Train

Ella Taylor — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 22:08:00 +0000
After he'd finished reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, did director Joe Wright scribble on the last page, "Needs more pep?"
Wright is, after all, the man who put the cute little ampersand in Pride & Prejudice and gave us a giggly Lizzie Bennet rendered by Keira Knightley.

Romance, Scandal And 'A Royal Affair' Of The Heart

Ella Taylor — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 22:03:00 +0000
The Oscar race for best foreign-language film rarely comes without a helping of muslin-and-bonnet dramas stuffed with misbehaving royals, masked balls and burgeoning job opportunities for food stylists. As heritage cinema goes, however, the year's Academy Award entry from Denmark is a firecracker.
Though it's dressed to kill in regulation brocade and upswept hairdos, this fact-based tale of high-born love and betrayal has a great deal more than Danish pastry on its mind.

Amid Discord, A 'Quartet' Strives For Harmony

Ella Taylor — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 21:03:00 +0000
It's rare these days to see an old-fashioned, elegant chamber-piece movie about life and art — let alone one with Christopher Walken as, of all things, a steadying influence.
In Yaron Zilberman's minor but satisfying A Late Quartet, Walken gets to keep his electric hair and preternatural calm. Otherwise, though, the actor flexes decidedly unmenacing new muscles as Peter, the recently widowed elder statesman of a highly regarded New York string quartet that has played together in apparent harmony for 25 years.

Life, And Something Like Love, In An Iron Lung

Ella Taylor — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:03:00 +0000
Disability biopics, especially the kind that bring audiences to their feet at Sundance, rarely have anywhere to carry us but on a linear journey from pity via empathy to tearful uplift.
The Sessions, a fact-based drama by writer-director Ben Lewin about a polio-stricken man in search of love and sex, goes that route, too, but the movie replaces the obligatory long face with a buoyantly irreverent spirit and a sexual candor rare on American screens.

Two Films, Two Takes On Living With Genocide

Ella Taylor — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:03:00 +0000
Simon and the Oaks, a handsomely upholstered Swedish drama about two troubled families trying to survive World War II, is based on a runaway best-selling novel by Marianne Fredriksson. The film was made with money from several Scandinavian countries once occupied by the Nazis, as well as from Germany itself. It won a truckload of Swedish Oscars, and in the accolades heaped upon the movie, the word "epic" is thrown around with abandon.
That's an awful lot of love for a sudsy family saga that owes much to the maternal melodramas cranked out by Hollywood in and around the war years.