Email Author Ella Taylor

Awards

• 2009 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published July 10, 2008

  "Was Roman Polanski a Pedophile"

• 2009 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published July 24, 2008

  "Waugh adn Remembrance"

• 2009 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published December 25, 2008

  "From Reverence to Rape"

• 2009 - National Entertainment Journalism Awards/LA Press Club, published September 11, 2008

  "The Women: Ladies Night"

• 2009 - National Entertainment Journalism Awards/LA Press Club, published December 11, 2008

  "Doubt Wags the Finger of Moral Relativism"

• 2009 - National Entertainment Journalism Awards/LA Press Club, published July 10, 2008

  "Was Roman Polanski a Pedophile"

• 2009 - National Entertainment Journalism Awards/LA Press Club, published July 24, 2008

  "Waugh and Remembrance"

• 2009 - National Entertainment Journalism Awards/LA Press Club, published December 25, 2008

  "From Reverence to Rape"

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2008 Stories by Ella Taylor

• Best Films of 2008

  published December 25, 2008

  Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Something in the water? Or is it just the way the wind is blowing? Whatever the case, when our... More >>

• The Reader Is Fundamental

  published December 25, 2008

  Like Doubt, Stephen Daldry's The Reader is low-budget, high-profile and beamed straight at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts... More >>

• Doubt Wags the Finger of Moral Relativism

  published December 18, 2008

  Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female... More >>

• Somewhere Over the Date Line in Australia

  published November 27, 2008

  You don't have to have been raised on colonial Brit Lit, classic melodramas, Westerns or war movies, or Gone With the Wind to figure out... More >>

• Leashed Lightning in Bolt

  published November 20, 2008

  With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney's... More >>

• Middlebrow French Melodrama in I've Loved You So Long

  published November 13, 2008

  Kristin Scott Thomas has gotten so locked into playing tragic victims or frigid grandes dames that few remember the actress got her big break as a... More >>

• Angelina Jolie takes on a serial killer and the system in Changeling

  published October 30, 2008

  On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown or just about any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los... More >>

• The Secret Life of Bees Is All Honey, No Sting

  published October 16, 2008

  A young woman fights off her brutal husband; a gun goes off; a marble spins on the floor where a toddler sits unattended. From B-movie beginnings,... More >>

• The Other Sister: Rachel Getting Married

  published October 16, 2008

  Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an... More >>

• Royally Screwed: The Duchess

  published September 25, 2008

  The Duchess is the best women's movie of the summer. Don't get too excited: Sex and the City, Mamma Mia! and The... More >>

• Ladies Light in The Women

  published September 11, 2008

  "What do you think this is?" cries a lady who lunches in Diane English's remake of George Cukor's The Women. "Some kind of '30s... More >>

• Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired Argues the Case...

  published August 28, 2008

  Along its winding road to crucifying the American judiciary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired — which aired to mostly warm... More >>

• Hard-Knock Life in Frozen River

  published August 21, 2008

  When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt's Frozen River at this year's... More >>

• High-School Heroes and Zeros Roam the Halls of Nanette Burstein's "documentary" American Teen

  published August 7, 2008

  Notwithstanding all the pundit-driven hot air about the horrors of being young in today's America, I'm willing to buy the argument that it's... More >>

• Brideshead Revisited Goes Back to the Book

  published July 31, 2008

  Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote that "Waugh is about as good a... More >>

• Mamma Mia! drains the fun out of ABBA

  published July 17, 2008

  I've always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it's good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling... More >>

• Paradise Lost in Surfwise

  published July 10, 2008

  Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we... More >>

• Kit Kittredge Is As American as Overpriced Dolls

  published July 3, 2008

  To my ten-year-old daughter, the term "American Girl" means "that store my meanie of a mom — unlike all the other, higher-quality moms... More >>

• A Domineering Dad and the Son Under his Thumb in When Did You Last See Your Father?

  published June 19, 2008

  Nothing snaps a child's head around quite like a dying parent, especially when the parent is a cantankerous old sod like Arthur Morrison (Jim... More >>

• Hairpiece in the Middle East: You Don't Mess with the Zohan

  published June 5, 2008

  Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad super-heavy: catching barbecued fish in his butt... More >>

• The Children of Huang Shi Is an Epic Bore

  published June 5, 2008

  Loath though I am to carp about any director who's devoted chunks of his career to bringing the nonwhite world's suffering to Western... More >>

• Cheap Sex and the City: The Movie

  published May 29, 2008

  Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won't tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you've already seen that... More >>

• 88 Minutes Is Too Long

  published April 17, 2008

  Jon Avnet's cheesy new thriller 88 Minutes is 105 minutes long, and going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al... More >>

• Married Life Is Far from Heaven

  published March 20, 2008

  Do we need another look back at the rotten heart of the '50s nuclear family? Ira Sachs thinks we do, and as one who can't get enough of sweaty... More >>

• Blood Money: The Counterfeiters

  published March 6, 2008

  Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish... More >>