Ella Taylor

No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell's eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy and gloriously unilateral, they still aren't the prettiest things about In Bruges — that honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium and unfavorable comparisons with Amsterdam......

The extraordinary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, more comfortably known as "that abortion movie that won this year's Palme d'Or," sheds its secrets slowly, a high-end realist drama quickening skillfully into a thriller. Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in......

One snowy Jerusalem night in 1966, I went with friends to see Doctor Zhivago. Though I wasn’t a movie buff and had no thoughts of becoming a film critic, the David Lean epic stirred in me the rudiments of a film sensibility, for that was the night I became dimly......

Some years it can be hard to come up with enough stellar lead performances to make an awards minyan. But every year is a good year for supporting roles, and not just because the field has grown so wide since independent film became a force to be reckoned with. Many......

Unless you count a slight preponderance of anthropomorphic rats (mercifully fewer than last year’s penguins), a wavelet of features that colonized the Iraq war in order to try and pour some juice back into the ailing action picture, or the miserable box-office numbers of dozens of independent films, the only......

At the Toronto Film Festival last September, Ella Taylor talked to Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona about Peter Pan, his happy childhood and others’ less fortunate under Franco, being discovered by Guillermo del Toro, and his new horror movie, The Orphanage. L.A. WEEKLY: The orphan movie is typically framed either......