Ella Taylor

Dour, detached, and oozing general contempt, the professor of literature who runs afoul of postapartheid South Africa in Australian director Steve Jacobs’ Disgrace might have been written for John Malkovich. In this film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s brilliant 1999 novel, the actor brings his languid creepiness, along with a hard-working......

Seventeen years ago, when Reservoir Dogs was setting American cinema on fire, Quentin Tarantino drove up to his favorite watering hole, Denny’s at Gower Gulch, in a tiny Geo that I mistook for a rental car. During a scheduled hourlong interview that stretched into nearly three, I chased him all......

(Originally published Ocober 23, 1992) A friend calls from the Sundance Film Festival to say that an unspeakably violent movie has taken the festival by storm. I carry on plucking my eyebrows. “So what else is new?” I answer listlessly. “This is the year of slash and burn. Is it......

Late in the infectiously frisky documentary The Cove, an older man calmly gate-crashes an international conference on whaling with a TV screen strapped to his chest, showing bloody images of the mass slaughter of dolphins in a cove off the coast of Japan. It’s a show-stopping publicity stunt by dolphin......

At the tail end of The Da Vinci Code, having traipsed around scenic Paris and London for over two hours to find out whether the Holy Grail was just an old cup or the womanly seed of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon, ace symbologist, sloped off back......

Forty years of suave political thrillers have made an awkward, lumbering creature out of Costa-Gavras’ adaptation of Vassili Vassilikos’ novel about the 1963 murder of Greek human-rights activist Gregorious Lambrakis. Even in 1970, when the movie won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and Best Actor at Cannes for Jean-Louis......

Lovely to look at but too slow and deliberate to get lost in, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is a tribute to still photography filtered through a portrait of working-class life wracked by war and want in early-20th-century Sweden. Written by Niklas Rådström from a story shaped by Troell and his......

Fifteen years after his death at age 59 from cancer of the pancreas and liver, Dennis Potter’s legacy is still up for grabs. Die-hard fans swear by every well-turned piece of dialogue the British television playwright wrote. Others believe he wrote two, maybe three masterpieces — Pennies From Heaven, The......

The bracingly strange artist Henry Selick has carved out a fruitful, if fitful, career animating the warped imaginations of other, equally strange artists like Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas) and Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach), both of which Selick directed. The CalArts graduate’s lifelong experiments with stop-motion......

The smirky, overbearing and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That Into You — which sold a regrettable two million copies when it was published in 2004 — seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times,......