Ella Taylor

I’d hoped to send only good thoughts the way of Kasi Lemmons’ biopic of Washington disc jockey Ralph Waldo (“Petey”) Greene Jr., if only because it tries to snatch shock-jockery back from the right and reclaim it for the populist black left. The visual daring that showed off Lemmons’ first......

{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......

The age of the superchild — a sitting target for our touching American belief in infinite human perfectibility via hyperparenting and educational engineering — has surely produced enough narcissistic little monsters to perk up the fatigued bad-seed movie. Heaven preserve us from an upcoming remake of the 1956 original by......

{mosimage}I grew up in two full-service welfare states, so when I first came to the United States in the summer of 1978, I didn’t pay much heed to an old friend from England who welcomed me to America, “a great country unless you happen to be old, poor or sick......

Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick flick, Lajos Koltai’s Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot’s beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel about a terminally ill woman trying to wrestle meaning out of the shards of her memories. Floating in and out of delirium in her Cambridge, Massachusetts,......

{mosimage} Do we need another movie about the liberal West watching in horror as something that daily befalls helpless bystanders all over Africa, Asia and the Middle East happens to one of us? We do: Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Islamic jihadists in Pakistan while......

Quick — which is more interesting, therapy or sex? In The Treatment, a feather-light comedy about losing emotional baggage and finding love in upper Manhattan, it’s the baggage that speaks, in an uproarious subplot about a mad Freudian analyst and his resentful patient. The main event, a romance between the......

{mosimage} Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman. It’s not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf’s undeniably scarred life and her relentless gift......