Ella Taylor

Two days before the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, all is calm and hushed here in Utah. No, really. While Park City prepares to morph from sleepy ski town into hyper Hollywood annex for the world’s most overcrowded film festival, I’m headed up to the peaceful resort that houses Robert Redford’s......

Canadian poet Anne Michaels’ beautiful 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces — about a Jewish writer immobilized by the memory of his Polish family’s murder at the hands of the Nazis — distills tragedy into grief, terror and a wary romance built on the redemptive power of love and art, and set......

In “Fatso,” a short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret, monogamy takes a bizarre vacation when the narrator’s pretty girlfriend morphs, every night, into a hairy, beer-guzzling, macho soccer fanatic who takes her lover to steak restaurants and sleazy bars — an experience as unexpectedly delightful to him as the......

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 Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it’s worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped......

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 melodramas about rotting families, I'm with him in principle. Joseph Lederer/Sony Pictures (Click to enlarge) Nighthawks Brosnan and McAdams cozy up......

For an obscure tale of a virginal London governess who discovers her true calling running interference for a giddy nightclub singer, the 1938 English novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has enjoyed a pretty lively renaissance. Knocked off in six weeks by Newcastle homemaker Winifred Watson while she washed......

In the world according to Jacques Rivette, a telling moment can run 15 minutes, and a film anywhere from three to 10 hours. If you're up for that — and few are in the canned world of taste-tested movies — the rewards can be infinite. In a single, breathtakingly long......

Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly played by Karl Markovics), packing to flee Berlin in 1936 with a suitcase full of fake money. We know from an opening coda that......

Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett is charming and quirky. Too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough, as played by an artfully rumpled and wide-eyed Anton Yelchin. Blazered, briefcased and blitzed, Charlie comes to us newly expelled from his......

Freudians disheartened by the Bearded One's fall from psychotherapeutic grace may be cheered to learn that ol' Sigmund lives and prospers at the movies, at least in child-friendly cinema. The Spiderwick Chronicles, an extravagantly oedipal fantasy adventure based on the popular children's novels by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, comes......