Ella Taylor

Walk Through the Valley

Ella Taylor
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 Fourth of July (1989) — redeemed their mangled, embittered grunts through the love of good women, devoted parents, political resistance, or all of the above. You......

Across the Universe: Help!

Ella Taylor
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......

The Bubble: Make Love, Not War

Ella Taylor
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 20-something hipsters and living in Tel Aviv), the movie would have attracted a smattering of......
All in the family (New Yorker Films)

Private Property: Mother and Sons

Ella Taylor
Joachim Lafosse’s intermittently compelling family drama Private Property comes with a prim dedication to “our boundaries,” and it doesn’t take long to see that the domestic unit festering under the roof of a lovely old Belgian farmhouse has none to speak of. Enmeshed doesn’t begin to describe the sorry crew......
Bourne to be bad (Jasin Boland/ 2007 Universal Studios)

The Bourne Ultimatum: New World Disorder

Ella Taylor
Faster and, if possible, furiouser than its predecessors, the latest episode in the stupendously lucrative Bourne franchise by now owes little more than a courtesy credit and an ample supply of free-floating CIA paranoia to the Robert Ludlum novels on which all three movies are very loosely based. Published in......
Not so plain Jane (Colm Hogan/Courtesy of Miramax Films)

Becoming Jane: Romp and Circumstance

Ella Taylor
Oh, wipe that starchy Masterpiece Theatre moue off your face — pop Jane Austen is fun, especially when it’s almost completely made up. According to Becoming Jane, a new addition to the plentiful Austen spinoff canon, off duty our lady of graceful letters was hot stuff at cricket and kissing......
Here come the grooms? (Photo by Tracy Bennett)

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry: Friends With Benefits

Ella Taylor
I wanted to hateI 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 true......
Bright future (Photo by Alex Bailey)

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine

Ella Taylor
There’s a lot of wizard science in Danny Boyle’s sci-fi thriller Sunshine, but for plot purposes all you really need to know is that the temperature at the sun’s core is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. This gets fairly crispy at close quarters, as the dedicated crew of the starship Enterprise......

Steve Buscemi: Second Glances

Ella Taylor
Outside of documentaries about poverty in Africa, AIDS has more or less slipped off the map of Western cinema and out of public consciousness. Which is only one reason to bring back, in a version newly restored by Outfest in conjunction with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Bill Sherwood’s......
Back to the garden (Kino International)

The Natural

Ella Taylor
{mosimage} 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......