Ella Taylor

EICHMANN Review

Ella Taylor
Based on pre-trial transcripts of Adolf Eichmann's 1961 interrogation by the young Israeli police captain Avner Less (here played by Troy Garity), British director Robert Young's well-intentioned dramatic re-enactment of their encounters is burdened by sepia-period accessorizing, laborious flashbacks, spurious comparisons between the two men's domestic lives, and the downright......

BUDRUS

Ella Taylor
BUDRUS The little-told story of a small but growing nonviolent opposition movement among rural West Bank Palestinians gets an airing in Julia Bacha's mostly fair-minded documentary. Budrus tells of one village's struggle to push back the Israeli security barrier that would uproot its olive trees, raze its cemetery and cut......

KALAMITY

Ella Taylor
KALAMITY Three male buddies barely out of their teens — one sad (Nick Stahl), one mad (Jonathan Jackson) and one weird (Christopher M. Clark) — reconvene in their northern Virginia hometown to chew over their troubles with women. It would ruin things if I told you which one of their......
law logo2x b

THE GIRL

Ella Taylor
GO  THE GIRL If a Grimm heroine were to resurrect herself in a late-20th-century body, that body would surely belong to the nameless waif in Swedish director Fredrik Edfeldt's slyly insidious feature debut. Left home alone when her parents go off to save the world in Africa, this sharp-eyed hamster......
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Movie Review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Ella Taylor
YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER Kept afloat by an excellent cast, Woody Allen's fourth movie about callow Londoners recklessly pursuing emotional wreckage begins with wisdom from the Bard, but thereafter it's the same old Bergman-lite. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is as careless with plot and......
Lovely

Movie Review: Lovely, Still

Ella Taylor
LOVELY, STILL A Christmas movie in September typically means either throwaway scheduling or advance Oscar positioning. And, for a while, this modest little picture from novice writer-director Nik Fackler seems to offer little more than the slightly dismaying sight of two great old actors striving to do right by a......
law logo2x b

Movie Review: RACE TO NOWHERE

Ella Taylor
RACE TO NOWHERE In the growing pantheon of documentaries about the American education system, Vicki Abeles' frankly partisan Race to Nowhere is a cri de coeur from a California mother of overstressed, symptomatic children groaning under the pressure of too much homework and testing, too many extracurricular activities geared toward......
The Milk of Sorrow

Movie Review: The Milk of Sorrow

Ella Taylor
GO THE MILK OF SORROW In this wonderfully strange, hypnotically beautiful second feature from writer-director Claudia Llosa (MADEINUSA), the traumatic experience of the 1980s civil war on Peruvian women is passed down through song and, it is said, through their mothers' milk. Fausta (Magaly Solier) is a shy young villager......
Annette Bening

The Kids Are All Right: My Generation

Ella Taylor
In The Kids Are All Right, two affluent hyperparents fret about their marriage, as well as their teenage children, the elder of whom is leaving for college, while the younger struggles to find his place in the world. Enter a tall, dark stranger to muddy the latently troubled waters, and......
Waiting to exhale: Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless

Breathless: The Dying Animal

Ella Taylor
While critics at Cannes break their heads trying to parse Jean-Luc Godard's latest enigma, Film socialisme (not to mention the 80-year-old filmmaker's ostentatious no-show for a press conference on the Croisette), Godard's first feature returns to remind us that this increasingly obscurantist genius once possessed a joyful heart. Breathless marks......