Ella Taylor

In Made, a new gangster comedy directed by the actor and screenwriter Jon Favreau, Favreau and Vince Vaughn play two bickering Los Angeles construction workers and amateur boxers trying to bluff their way through a perfectly routine drop job in New York, assigned to them by the Los Angeles mobster......

Photo by Michael Powers A born provocateur, the young actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz is blessed or burdened, depending on how dainty you like your French film, with a most un-Gallic taste for apocalypse. His 1995 film Hate, which dealt with the aftermath of a race riot in a rundown......

Photo by Nick Wall The young wizards who make television ads and rock videos are turning in droves to filmmaking, and it’s no stretch to see why they make a beeline for neo-noir, with its compulsive skimming of life’s shiny surfaces. To its credit, Sexy Beast — a self-proclaimed “neon......

You don’t have to be a critic to make short work of a Michael Bay movie: bang bang, paper-thin characters, wooden screenplay. Pearl Harbor is all of the above, but there‘s no dismissing the film, if only because it offers another long, loud example of how Hollywood remains the hagiographic......

It’s here that The Road Home turns into an endearing marriage of the heroic pastoralism of early Soviet film and -- though Zhang would gnash his teeth at the very idea -- a Hollywood love story that, for sheer dogged, love-conquers-all individualism, could rival any his-and-hers romance that has rolled......

Jean (played by Charlotte Rampling and Bruno Cremer), are settling into their seaside vacation home. Cocooned in the companionable silence of the long-married, they fold slipcovers, gather firewood, boil pasta and prepare for bed. Even as we‘re being soothed with the languorous pleasures of domestic habit, though, the director is......

Eureka, a Japanese movie about the aftermath of a city-bus massacre, may be one of the quietest films ever made about an act of violence. At 3 hours and 40 minutes, it’s probably also one of the longest. Hang in: I can‘t think of a film made in the West......

In his 1989 film Homework, the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is, characteristically, heard but not seen as he quizzes a succession of nervous little boys with enormous dark eyes about how they carry out their after-school assignments. To Western ears, their cagey answers show them to be well-behaved to a......

Robbed of the bleak Cold War espionage arena that was for decades his bread and butter, John Le Carre has kept his perch at the top of the best-seller lists with books like The Night Manager, The Secret Pilgrim and The Tailor of Panama, tales of a mad new world......

In Christopher Nolan’s fiendishly clever thriller, Memento, a young man named Leonard Shelby (played by the Anglo-Australian actor Guy Pearce, who cut his American teeth as the ambitious young police detective in L.A. Confidential) suffers from a short-term memory deficit severe enough to reduce to embarrassed silence any and all......