Ella Taylor

Unless you’re an Asian-film buff, or pushing 60, the closest you may have come to the work of Japanese master Kon Ichikawa is his lovely 1983 movie The Makioka Sisters, the story of a quarrelsome dynastic family weathering World War II and Japan’s rapid transit to modernity. Even with blue-ribbon......

Shallow Hal is your mother‘s Farrelly Brothers movie, an old-fashioned romantic comedy bearing the message that your parents, assuming they were up to the job, drilled into you: Handsome is as handsome does; beauty is skin-deep; it’s character, not packaging, that matters. Except that the movie also makes much of......

At 29 years old, Amir Bar-Lev shows an appreciation for the ambiguities of human psychology and experience that would defeat far more seasoned minds than his -- which may come from hanging out with men 50 years his senior. Bar-Lev met Jan Wiener while studying film in Prague as part......

Fighter, a humane and precociously wise documentary by the young Los Angeles director Amir Bar-Lev, accompanies two Czech-American Jewish emigres in their 70s as they return to their native Prague to retrace the route that one of them, Jan Wiener, took to escape the Nazis. ”The motive is sad,“ says......

It’s a measure of how much and how fast our world has shifted of late that Richard Linklater‘s latest philosophical gabfest plays like nostalgia for a time -- eons ago, five weeks ago -- when all we had to worry about, aside from our mutual funds and our Palm Pilots......

Here’s how to raise hackles on Stephen Frears within seconds of meeting him: Suggest that he will best be remembered as a European filmmaker. Frears is in town to promote his new film, Liam, one of those modestly budgeted homages to British working-class life for which he is justly celebrated......

“I wanted to make a simple film that would be perfectly understandable,” Jean-Luc Godard told an interviewer shortly after completing Band of Outsiders, easily the most brilliant of the genuflections bestowed on the American gangster movie by the French New Wave. So it is a simple film, if only in......

Jim Sheldon In 1947, the Ladies’ Home Journal ran an abridged version of a suspense novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, which subsequently became a best-seller. It’s easier than you might imagine to see what made The Blank Wall’s lurid plot — a mother hides the corpse of her daughter’s no-good......