Ella Taylor

Tart of tongue and sweet of disposition, Juno offers living proof that crisp writing, graceful directing and an abundantly poised young lead can perk up a premise that’s been bludgeoned to death. Written by the alarmingly named Diablo Cody (real name: Brook Busey-Hunt; Diablo sounds like one of the names......

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......

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......

You don’t have to have been adopted by your own brother to develop a sharp eye for family madness, but in Tamara Jenkins’ case, it sure has helped. Her heavily autobiographical 1998 cult hit, Slums of Beverly Hills, offered a fictionalized version of the writer-director’s childhood, in which she and......

In Starting Out in the Evening, a new film by Andrew Wagner, a pneumatic graduate student spreads honey over the face of the elderly New York novelist she’s trying to seduce. Later, the two will lie down on his bed with their hands by their sides, and later still, he......

If you’re of a certain age, chances are one of your seminal childhood moviegoing experiences was Albert Lamorisse’s lovely 34-minute The Red Balloon (1956), about a Parisian boy’s friendship with a red balloon so iridescent that I incorrectly remembered the rest of the film as black-and-white. Now you can take......

If you’re of a certain age, chances are one of your seminal childhood moviegoing experiences was Albert Lamorisse’s lovely 34-minute The Red Balloon (1956), about a Parisian boy’s friendship with a red balloon so iridescent that I incorrectly remembered the rest of the film as black-and-white. Now you can take......

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”......

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......