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Ella Taylor

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The Savages

Testing the limits of familial bonds, one nursing-home application at a time

By Ella Taylor
Dec 26, 2007

Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism "uncharted territory" is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell we're doing. Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of that terror in her new film, The Savages, and jacks...
The Kite Runner

Controversy aside, this adaptation just won't fly

By Ella Taylor
Dec 19, 2007

Kites fly high over San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster's flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan's misery under serial totalitarian rule. Arriving on the heels of Atonement, The Kite Runner tells a parallel,...
Atonement

Ian McEwan's Atonement, now as a bodice-ripper

By Ella Taylor
Dec 5, 2007

Rereading Ian McEwan's Atonement last weekend, my first thought was: I hope to God that Joe Wright — whose broadly grinning Pride & Prejudice made a mess of Jane Austen two years ago — doesn't screw up this wonderful novel about lust, love, loss and what art can do to...
Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Mr. Magorium is far less fantastical than its title

By Ella Taylor
Nov 14, 2007

Midway through the amiable children's movie Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, there comes a speech that I'll wager writer-director Zach Helm has been saving for future use ever since he discovered the Bard. As pop philosophy goes, it's bracing stuff: Paraphrasing King Lear, Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman), a 243-year-old "toy impresario"...
Lions for Lambs

The odd upside of Robert Redford's terribly earnest, quite terrible war drama

By Ella Taylor
Nov 7, 2007

Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn't even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The...
Sleuth

Better home and garden, but not much else in Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth remake

By Ella Taylor
Oct 31, 2007

Before he snagged the lead in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1972 screen version of Anthony Shaffer's 1970 stage play Sleuth, Laurence Olivier had, with his customary diplomatic finesse, dismissed the source material as "a piece of piss." Two movie adaptations later, I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. Still, it's not...
Here, Baby, Here

Playing down-on-her-luck, Amy Ryan's star rises.

By Ella Taylor
Oct 31, 2007

I hope people ask me, 'Where did you find that local actress?'" Ben Affleck told Amy Ryan when he cast her as a wreck of a single mother in his directing debut, Gone Baby Gone. When Ryan showed up on the Boston set in ratty hair, muddy makeup, and a...
Rendition

It's not torture, but this latest Mideast thriller's as conventional as they come. We're (water) bored. (Sorry.)

By Ella Taylor
Oct 17, 2007

Late in Rendition, in case you've been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret prisons abroad takes place. On one side is a driven young senatorial aide (Peter Sarsgaard), on the other...
The Bubble

Twentysomething Tel Aviv hipsters live life, have sex, befriend the enemy in The Bubble

By Ella Taylor
Oct 10, 2007

Had Israeli director Eytan Fox's new film, about a passionate affair between two men on opposite sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict, been released in the early 1970s (when I was the same age as its twentysomething hipsters and living in Tel Aviv), the movie would have attracted a smattering of...
Across the Universe

Run for your life if you can, little girl: Julie Taymor's '60s-set musical is a bust

By Ella Taylor
Oct 3, 2007

After Hair, Hairspray and the mass marketing of tie-dye, can the '60s be shrunk to fit any further? Yes, indeed, here comes Julie Taymor to run the revolutions of sex, class and race through the PG-13 sieve. Not that one turns to musicals for deep thought, but John Waters at...
In the Valley of Elah

Don't let Paul Haggis's heavy hand stop you from seeing his latest

By Ella Taylor
Sep 19, 2007

Even the most adamantly antiwar movies about American soldiers returning from Vietnam — Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978) and Oliver Stone's Born on the 4th of July (1989) — redeemed their mangled, embittered grunts through the love of good women, devoted parents, political resistance or all of the above. You...
Lady Chatterley

Chatterley adaptation makes the orgasmic organic

By Ella Taylor
Sep 12, 2007

The raciest thing I ever saw my mother do was read a brown-paper-covered Penguin edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover on the London Underground. She didn't fool all the other passengers carrying similarly disguised copies, and though I was only 12 years old in that fall of 1960...
I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry

Two straight guys pretend to be gay and turn out to be humanists in Chuck & Larry

By Ella Taylor
Jul 19, 2007

I wanted to hate I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, truly I did. Two straight guys pretending to be gay (insert fiscal excuse here); been there, done that (insert all known variants on The Odd Couple here). Rampant homophobia hiding behind liberal pleas for tolerance — blech. And it's...
Evening

Chick-flick genre to Evening: Why you gotta make us look bad?

By Ella Taylor
Jun 28, 2007

Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick-flick, Lajos Koltai's Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot's beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel about a terminally ill woman trying to wrestle meaning out of the shards of her memories. Floating in and out of delirium in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home,...
La Vie En Rose

Marion Cotillard gives a star turn, but can't save Edith Piaf biopic

By Ella Taylor
Jun 21, 2007

plifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie En Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman. It's not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf's undeniably scarred life and her relentless gift...
Shrek the Third

Third time's the charmless for Shrek franchise

By Ella Taylor
May 17, 2007

Coming out of Shrek the Third, I asked the two smart pre-teen girls I had in tow what they had liked about the picture. Projectile vomiting and multiple farts, they said promptly, best Shrek ever. Ordinarily I'm not big on poop and flatulence, but in this instance I sympathized —...
Georgia Rule

La Lohan elevates -- but can't save -- Georgia Rule

By Ella Taylor
May 10, 2007

Three noisy women and a worn-out premise rattle around trying to make contact in Georgia Rule, an incoherent dramedy of rampant parental insufficiency from director Garry Marshall. Marshall's broad comedy has always made him a soft target for critics, but along with his duds (Beaches, Runaway Bride and Raising Helen...
Away from Her

Love and marriage meet life and Alzheimer's in Away from Her

By Ella Taylor
May 10, 2007

In the superbly tacit chamber piece Away from Her, intolerable pressure is brought to bear on the 44-year marriage between a college professor and his homemaker spouse after she is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Grant Andersson (played by veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent) and his wife Fiona (an artfully wrinkled...
Avenue Montaigne

Life and art meet sweet in this breezy French comedy

By Ella Taylor
Mar 29, 2007

Neutrally retitled from the more pertinent Orchestra Seats, Avenue Montaigne is a French soufflé of the old school, a romantic comedy set in Paris's arty district, where neurotic writers and actors wring their manicured hands and -- at least in flirty little numbers like this one -- rub shoulders with...
The Namesake

The immigrant experience meets a generation gap in Mira Nair's The Namesake

By Ella Taylor
Mar 22, 2007

Packed with female book club members, a screening of Mira Nair's The Namesake left no doubt about the film's target audience. If anyone's going to flock to this warm and likable tale, it's going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of...
Behind the Music

Not even Michael Gambon's 18th-century hat head can save a wretch like Amazing Grace

By Ella Taylor
Feb 22, 2007

Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake, Michael Apted's Amazing Grace is set among bickering House of Commoners in late-18th-century London, but the movie belongs squarely in the currently blooming subgenre of Whites Saving Dark-skinned Victims of Empire. Or at least it would were Apted able to bring a little...
Miss Congeniality

Beatrix Potter gets an extreme makeover

By Ella Taylor
Jan 4, 2007

I am sorry to say that Peter did not feel very well that evening. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of chamomile tea. "One tablespoon to be taken at bedtime." But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. -- Beatrix...

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Ella Taylor