Ella Taylor

That sly old elf Sidney Lumet opens his new movie with a sexual encounter you might associate with a man spending his frustration on a compliant hooker. Bracket the thought, you’ll need it later. For now, this carnal exchange is as close to intimacy as New York real-estate executive Andy......

For several years now, I’ve been writing that Israeli cinema is growing up. A pox on my condescension: It’s not that Israeli movies have abandoned their preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict. They’re just less obsessive and self-serious about it, and more inclined to integrate those concerns into a broader investigation......

Two blocks east of the Institute for Plastic Surgery and Anti-Aging in Beverly Hills, lunching ladies put down their forks and stare. A very tall presence in geometric hair and dramatic bronze cape dress sweeps in and, unaware of the electrified air around her, plops down in Il Cielo’s swank......

My 9-year-old daughter’s interest in boys is largely confined to whether she can outrun them, and yet she has acquired a precise, if mercifully abstract, grasp of the contemporary arts of seduction. Repeated close study of the Disney Channel’s High School Musical and its identical sequel has taught her how......

“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......

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......

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......

The first in a series of profiles highlighting the outstanding supporting players of the fall movie season. So here’s this Arab actor talking to me in Hebrew about his role as a Saudi soldier in Peter Berg’s The Kingdom — which ought to be enough cultural confusion to throw anyone,......

In a few brief scenes in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, lost soul Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) bonds with maternal hippie Jan Burres, played by Catherine Keener. Chris has been poorly parented; Jan’s grown son has drifted away: The two tap into and soothe one another’s sense of loss. Jan......