Ella Taylor

It doesn’t take a cynic to ask whether Warner Bros. held back the release of Collateral Damage because the company thought the movie would hurt post–September 11 America, or vice versa. Notwithstanding the momentary eagerness of some industry moguls to offer consulting services to the Bushies, Hollywood is ever more......

Here‘s a thing: an Israeli movie about a suicide bomber, and there’s not a Palestinian in sight. Time of Favor, concerning a Jewish plot to blow up a mosque on Jerusalem‘s Temple Mount, walked off with six Israeli academy awards and blew away the box office among audiences you’d think......

Joseph Cedar, the 33-year-old American-born director of Time of Favor, is a former Israeli paratrooper and an Orthodox Jew. He spent a year living on a Jewish settlement on the West Bank while writing the script for the movie, inspired by a news story about a religious army officer falsely......

Well before it landed on our shores, the Danish romantic comedy Italian for Beginners had carried off all manner of European prizes, including an international critics’ award for “advancing the Dogme movement.” I wouldn’t know about that, but the film’s director, Lone Scherfig — significantly, the first woman to direct......

Brotherhood of the Wolf, the best 18th-century French kickboxing costume drama of 2002, is a wonder of magpie postmodernism, a samurai adventure with Hong Kong action and a wry touch of American Western, all sewn into a free interpretation of Gallic history that also has its finger on the pulse......

Photo by Neal Preston In the modish 1997 thriller Open Your Eyes, Spanish heartthrob Eduardo Noriega played a troubled narcissist trapped in a serial nightmare, possibly of his own creation. In Cameron Crowe’s remake, Tom Cruise plays a troubled narcissist trapped in several pounds of injury makeup, as well as......

If nothing else, Charles Shyer‘s first excursion into costume drama offers another shining example of Hollywood’s unshakable conviction that history is ineluctably British, even when it‘s demonstrably French. Though The Affair of the Necklace is set in pre-Revolutionary Versailles, it fairly teems with BBC diction, including Hilary Swank’s. As Jeanne......

Photo by John Clifford The actor Todd Field, who first got noticed playing suitor to Ashley Judd’s troubled shop girl in Victor Nuñez’s Ruby in Paradise, has turned director with a stately film about domestic tragedy that, if the ecstatic festival reaction at Sundance and Toronto this year is anything......